I know, right!
This was out of nowhere for me too. I was just trying to find a new challenge for my self.
I memorized the steps necessary to publish an article in WordPress and it became boring. So, I decided to switch things up, learn something new and save some money at the same time.
At first, I wanted to move to Jekyll because I knew about it from years ago and I always been interested in trying it as well as learning about GitHub. But never had a real reason to do so, until now. I installed Jekyll and started playing around with it and as I was searching for articles online on how to do certain things with it, the name Hugo kept coming up. Curiosity kicked in, and I decided to check Hugo myself.
From what I read online, Hugo is faster than Jekyll and this made me want to try it for my self. Since News47ell have more than 200 articles and a large number of photos, I didn’t want to try something that was slow, and then ruin the experience for me.
Hugo’s documents were clear and easy to follow, a command here and a command there, and a site was up and running locally on my machine. A week went by and News47ell was already replicated on my MacBook using Hugo with -as you can see- a design that is identical to the amazing WordPress theme, GeneratePress.
News47ell is now hosted with GitHub, built and deployed by Netlify and then spread all over the world thanks to Cloudflare. At the moment, I am keeping the repository for News47ell private but, I might make it public in the future.
I also managed to reduce the numbers of photos in my site folder from 3947 to 755. Those images were due to many duplicated that were created by WordPress in order to load smaller images on smaller sites.
I also compressed them using a lossless format on TinyPNG. Which lowered the size of all the images from 353 MB to 59 MB
Now that I moved to a new platform, I’m going to start writing about different things. Mainly, Hugo and anything terminal related like Vim, Homebrew and interesting package that I stumble upon.
The previous article could be the last one that is WordPress related, this one should be the last one for 2018.
Let me know what you think of Hugo. If you’re an old user, did you notice an increase in the site speed?
If you’re WordPress user, does this make you want to switch?
And this is my last article for 2018.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.