I have always liked having control of my personal website. My first iteration was Worpress powered. And while it is very potent and can be tailored to your needs, it was a little too bloated for my taste. It comes packed with so many features that I, personally, will never make use of.

So I started looking around for something leaner and more to my palate.

After a while, I found Ghost, which looked lovely with no extra features, just a simple CMS and proper templating through Handlebars. Perfect, or so I thought.

While it is an excellent blogging platform and you can have static pages with information like an about page, etc. There is no way to move your blog content to someplace else than the front page of your site without having the pagination system break. There are workarounds to fix this, and I used one for a long while now, but it never really sat right with me to have a small hack there nagging at me.

So when I could not take it anymore. I once again took to the world wide web to find my perfect framework.

As my search continued, I found myself wondering if I needed a server-based solution like Wordpress or Ghost. This was for my own portfolio, and not some big collaborative project, why couldn’t it be static? After all, static means faster and more secure. The fact that I had become locked out of my ghost admin unable to reset the password made me not want a framework bound CMS to handle my content.

So what to go with? There is what seemed to be the big dog Jekyll, which uses Liquid as templating and is written in Ruby. I have never used Ruby or Liquid, so I was hesitant.

There seemed to be some other interesting ones like Gutenberg, which is written in Rust and that got me interested since I would like to do something in Rust.

But ultimately, I settled with Hugo. It has the advantages of being one of the more popular. It is written in Go and uses Go as the templating language hitting two birds with one stone. It is also highly customizable, everything from your own shortcodes to adding fields to posts and content types. There is also a local Hugo web server that has auto-refresh so that you can preview on each save, making theme creation more smoothly. Lastly, the name reminds me of a beloved childhood character, which didn’t make it less attractive.

So there you have it, my reason to go with Hugo as my way of creating content.