I’ve been pretty heavily reorganizing and simplifying my life lately, so it was time to replace the tired old Wordpress blog at ShellRunner with something more deserving.

Wordpress has been a great platform over the years, but as a constant target of attacks, it could also be a pain to keep up. Also, it’s much more fun to write my posts in Markdown, instead of in a browser editor.

This is post #1 trying out Hugo, a fast static generator written in Go with a lot of features. So far, I’m impressed. I’ve written a few static site generators myself in the past (including a fun project composed entirely of AWK/sed/grep/redirects), but I’m I don’t really want to build out the path-correction, tagging, and embedding formats in my free time, so I’ll give Hugo a try.

The best part of hugo is how quickly I was able to get going, despite all the built-in features. I’m really excited to see that it fits my needs well on the batteries-included vs. extensibility scale. Even the default taxonomies are exactly what I wanted, though configuring additional looks easy, too.

My sole complaint is that I can’t seem to find a way to conditionally add scripts or styles to pages based on features in content. For instance, some of my posts include code blocks in multiple programming languages, which I would like to create using shortcodes embedded in content. These blocks require CSS and JavaScript that doesn’t need to be on every page, but I don’t yet see a way to get information about shortcodes when building the parts of the pages where script references belong. I’ll keep dig a bit more and post an article hear if I find out how.