But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and. Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build.
And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.īut yeah, things are different now. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.īut wowza, things have changed. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. #StaticSiteGenerators #SelfHostedBloggingCms #SupportSalesAndMarketing NET CMS called N2 but we plan to swap that out with Hugo as well in future.
Hugo is an open source static site generator that has enabled us to reduce load times by over 500% and make our blog far more maintainable across the whole team. We could see in our own Real User Monitoring tool that many users were experiencing page load speeds of over five seconds, even longer in worst case scenarios. I know there will be die hard fans out there with ways to set things up that mean WordPress sites can load quickly, but we needed something a lot more streamlined.
Our biggest driver to find an alternative solution however was just how slow Wordpress is at serving content to the end user.
We found ourselves struggling to maintain our Wordpress install given the amount of theme updates, plugins and security patches needing to be applied. When we started the company, our blog wasn’t really our top priority, and it ended up being hosted on a fairly obscure server within our setup, which didn’t really change much until recently when things become harder to manage and make significant updates.Īs our marketing team increased, the amount of traffic that found us through our content marketing increased. There’s no doubt WordPress is a great CMS, which is very user friendly. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.
It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.Īfter about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. * I still have a few Disqus comment threads to mapĮarlier this year, I migrated my personal website () from Jekyll to Hugo. I think I might write an importer for that. * I did find some of the lost WordPress posts on that I downloaded with the wayback machinedownloader. I'm working on a command-line Ruby gem for the current plan. I did notice the old URLs were stored in the front matter. Although, there may be something in Jekyll that could manage the redirects. The URI format is different so a complete redirect wouldn't work. * Set up redirects for all posts on blogger.
The Importer was fairly straightforward for the existing blog posts.
I looked at a few options where I wouldn't have to worry about hosting cost indefinitely and Jekyll stood out with GitHub Pages. I blogged about writing again on the existing Blogger blog but it didn't feel right. I eventually graduated from BizSpark and outgrew the credit allotment. A lot happened in the time after that migration but I stopped coding and changed cities during tumultuous times that taught me many lessons concerning mental health and productivity.
I created a WordPress blog and did a migration at some point. I started a company and joined BizPark with the Microsoft Azure allotment. I decided to start blogging in 2013 on Blogger. I've heard that I have the ability to write well, at times.