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by spf13 1931 days ago
I did this exact thing when I got frustrated with Jekyll (and friends) and created Hugo. Of course, at the time all SSGs were in dynamic languages and very VERY slow.

Happy to see some Hugo ideas made it into Zola.

7 comments

I know the feeling. In my very meta case I get frustrated with my own SSGs, so every time I start learning a new language an SSG is one of my two standard projects to give a frame of comparison.

I now have my own SSGs written in C#, Go, Node, Python, Ruby, and PHP. It's totally ridiculous, I know. Yak shaving and shiny to the nth degree.

That makes a lot of sense to me. It used to be that writing a blog engine was the "Hello World" of a new language or framework. So, it makes sense that a SSG would be a good non-trivial project to use to learn or understand the pros/cons of a language.
I prefer ray-tracers (or other rendering or physics engines), maybe because I'm old or have nothing to blog about.
Sorry to pile on here, but THANKS for Hugo! It’s legitimately great and has helped me quickly and easily updated (with the help of netlify) set up a really useful set of online notes for myself. I truly appreciate your work.
Hey - thanks for making Hugo. We run our blog on it and I love it. Spitting out an AMP version and maintaing it side-by-side with our non-AMP version was a piece of cake.

Edit: noticed you make Cobra too! Damn - I owe you like 1000 man hours of saved work.

spf13, thank you for your vim config, I have been using it for years!

In regards to Hugo, I enjoyed using it at first, I loved how fast it was, but I kept running into issues so I decided to make my own SSG.

I absolutely love Hugo and as someone who was completely new to static site generators, it was the easiest to pick up and use in my opinion. Thanks!
Hey there, I’m a happy Jekyll user. What frustrated you about it?
Jekyll lost me at “step one, install ruby”
When Jekyll was created, all Apple laptops shipped with Ruby, and Apple has (had?) a large share of the “developer/power user” market. That’s my theory, at least.
Even shared hosting at the time came with ruby on rails support. Maybe it still does, but ruby was way more popular at the time in general.
Thanks for making Hugo. Hugo is the only SSG I found with a good story regarding i18n.