This weekend I took the opportunity of some downtime and the fact that I’ve deployed a new primary VPS (with the wonderful iocoop) to migrate my blog source to use hugo, leaving behind the Octopress setup I’ve had for a while.

Why? Well I’ve been on a small Go kick recently at $DAYJOB and elsewhere and having played with some of the other utilities developed by spf13 such as cobra and admiring their ergonomics and simplicity I was keen to give hugo a try.

On top of that the Octopress setup I had never seemed to be very stable. Octopress itself has been in the middle of a major rewrite for quite some time, and combined with the hassle of bootstrapping the requisite Ruby runtime each time I started using a machine, the resulting hassle meant that my blog hasn’t seen much use.

Hugo on the other hand is a) a single static binary which I can build easily on any of my development machines b) way more minimal in its configuration and c) much more functionaly complete.

Thankfully hugo comes with an import jekyll command which allowed me to import the few blog posts that I’d already written. The only content left behind was the “about” page which is easily reproduced.

Add in a Makefile to make generation and deployment an easy process, and the resulting blog code is much cleaner.

I doubt this will be a major solo catalyst in promoting more writing on my par, but I do hope that it’ll significantly reduce the activation energy that exists for me to publish anything.