Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my new website!

I mean site url, content and topics are still the same but but now I use Hugo instead of Wordpress.

Why change

Speed: my website got slower and slower. Static pages are fast, very fast.

Easy of use: I started to use markdown to write posts then copy&paste them in Wordpress via browser. This process was slow and required too many steps.

Saving: since Hugo doesn’t require a database I can save a few euros per year and cancel the database subscription from the provider.

Offline editing and preview: I can edit posts, theme and see how it behaves on my PC without installing a web server, Hugo includes it’s own web server.

What will be missed

Wordpress included a plugin to check grammar and spelling that fixed a lot of error end typos. Markdownpad has spell check, I forgot to enable it.

Jetpack by Wordpress has detailed statistics. Hugo uses Google Analytics . The feature I liked from Jetpack is to show when a new post is published to math views and updates.

Tech details

The migration requires two steps:

  1. export the mysql database where all the Wordpress posts are stores
  2. run a script that exports all the posts in markdown format

Then install Hugo , chose a theme (I use Blackburn ), write pages in markdown and export them where you like.

I save the files in a Dropbox account so I don’t need to worry about backup, versioning and keep files in sync between my work and personal computers.

To upload files to my ISP I use lftp , installed via Chocolatey on my Windows 10 PC.

This is the script I use now:

open -u MYUSER,MYPASS ftp.ifconfit.it
mirror -R -P 5 -p -n /cygdrive/c/data/HUGO/sites/ifconfig.it/public /www.ifconfig.it/hugo

I think there’s room for improvement on this last step.

Wrap up

I think Hugo and markdown will make my blogging easier and faster so I can focus on the actual content instead of spending time fixing Wordpress and writing in a bad online editor.

I’ll miss the grammar/spelling check so forgive typos and errors. I noticed Markdownpad2 has spell/grammar check, I just forgot to enable it.

Updates

Hugo themes may support differend shortcodes, sed can help to fix that.