I like static generated sites, simple, effective and secure. I love github pages as it gets the job done easily and well. Jekyll is a natural fit with github pages and was a great way to start building a blog. However recently Hugo has caught my attention.

I decided to switch to Hugo for a few different reasons:

• I like the clean directory layout better with Hugo.

• I want disqus, rss, tags, some easy social sharing links and google analytics. All of that is possible with Jekyll but some of these are much easier to setup with Hugo.

• It continues to have all the static site generation goodness and allows me to keep working with markdown and yaml.

• Not that I have the greatest visual appeal to the blog now but a refreshed look is still welcome.

On top of those reasons I am learning golang, which happens to be why I haven’t blogged in awhile but also adds some appeal to Hugo. The simple single binary installation is great compared to dealing with ruby gems. That along with the ability to explore the code while I learn golang are really the reasons I first started looking at Hugo.

It isn’t all great with Hugo, it does need a separate git repo which is a bit of a pain. Luckily the github pages tutorial does a great job at explaining a few different git subrepo techniques and scripts to minimize the pain.