Hugo VS Jekyll

A few days back, I wrote a blog post about static site generators, in particular how I decided to migrate my blog from Zola to Hugo. One of my points was to be able to hack my own content before generating the final HTML.

This post is a summary of my recent decision to go back to Hugo after using Zola. I also report on how LLM assistants with Web access can aid in such decisions, not as an authority but as a research assistant.

Hugo is a fast and flexible static site generator built in Go, known for its speed and large theme ecosystem. It supports markdown, taxonomies, multilingual content, and powerful templating with minimal dependencies. Hugo is highly performant and well-suited for building large-scale documentation sites. It’s ideal for teams seeking speed and customization with minimal runtime requirements.

Try Hugo[1]. In depends on a template you choose alone whether Hugo will generate a landing page, a website, a blog, etc.

[1] https://gohugo.io

The content of the guide lives in a single Markdown file, content/_index.md. The website is built using Hugo.

Every PKMS/BASB needs a search functionality. Ever since I've created brainfck to host my own collection of thoughts/ideas/resources (aka Zettelkasten) I wanted to be able to actually search within my collection of org-roam based notes. Meanwhile for all my sites I own (this blog, my CV/portfolio, brainfck and defersec) I use hugo. All of them didn't have proper search capabilities. That's why I was looking for a proper way to include search functionalities without any major effort.

A fast and flexible static site generator built with love by bep, spf13, and friends in Go.

This project demonstrates how to deploy a static website using Hugo and Pulumi on AWS S3. Hugo is a fast static site generator, and Pulumi is an infrastructure-as-code tool that allows you to define cloud resources using TypeScript. The site is deployed to an S3 bucket configured as a static website, with public access enabled for viewing.

It was long my desire to write a blog with stuff that interests me. Lately i was studying Golang and i came across Hugo which is a really nice and fast site generation utility. This was a great opportunity to start my own blog by using Hugo and Github Pages in order to host it. Why?

I wanted to automate this boring and repetitive workflow: my idea is that every time a YouTube video is published on my channel I want to have an associated post on my personal Jekyll blog.

The static site generator (SSG) landscape is crowded with feature-rich but increasingly complex solutions. As I looked at and used tools like lume, 11ty, lektor, or jekyll, I found myself drowning in configuration options, plugins, and middleware. What started as a simple desire to convert Markdown content into HTML had evolved into learning complex frameworks with steep learning curves.

Jekyll

If you don't want to use Jekyll as your static site generator for GitHub Pages and you want to have a custom domain for your GitHub Pages. This post is for you!

Jekyll is a static site generator that transforms Markdown files into a fully functional website. Everything is generated into plain HTML, which makes it simple to deploy on platforms like GitHub Pages.

Obviously, there are a dozen choices for generating static websites (efficiently and quickly), from the classic Jekyll to the new Next.js. And you are good to go with any of them as long as your confident with it. I choose 11ty because:

That would be an improvement, but it still wouldn't be equivalent to what you can do with Ruby and Jekyll. For example I do [1] so I don't need to put dates in my post names, which also fixes a bug [2] I encountered but was never fixed.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/68287682/660921

[2]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8707

In your repository settings you need to turn on GitHub Pages to make it pull Jekyll content (that's the magic✨ default GitHub Pages build tool) from your GitHub repository.