Goodbye Hugo

Hugo has been the backbone of my blog for over five years now, but it's time to say goodbye. I came to this decision after I wanted to try out a new, simpler site design and couldn't get even the most basic theme working with the older version of Hugo I was running. To use the design I wanted, it seemed I would have to start entirely from scratch and port my old posts over to whatever the "new" way was, then iterate on everything until I was happy with it.

All of this seemed like too much work. Instead, I decided to move on from Hugo and figure out how to generate a static site from scratch. I'm a big fan of Clojure, and I've been looking for some excuse to give Babashka a try.

The site is now being generated entirely through Clojure via Babashka, including the post you're reading right now! This might sound like it was more work than just getting everything to work with Hugo, but it only took a few hours to write the appropriate methods to not only parse markdown into HTML but to:

• Be able to have a process running that can watch for any changes, recompiling when needed.
• Launch a web server to serve my local site
• Render templates, static pages
• Handle some custom routing

On top of all this, everything feels much simpler to understand and straightforward to modify.