Bye WordPress, Hello HUGO

Hello!

Another refresh after 5 years! Yes, finally I get around to updating this site again after all these years! Although, it’s not like it was on purpose. My previous setup was as always using WordPress, but seems like one of the updates that I did kinda broke my site. As I was trying to fix it, one thing led to another, and I actually didn’t manage to find what was causing it to break, so in the end I decided to just redo the whole site again, but this time instead of just refreshing the WordPress theme, I chose to actually rebuild it from ground up using a totally different framework, which is to use HUGO.

Why HUGO?

I’ve been building websites since ages ago, I think I started out using HTML3 if I remember correctly, then came the “flash websites” era which was really fun & cool with all the heavy animation, heck I even got a macromedia flash certification along with their ActionScript, but we all know how things ended with flash, right? I think after that i came across Mambo CMS, which I think lasted until circa 2008. From there I started out working with WordPress to build websites, it’s a nice CMS with a very powerful customization capabilities. I had fun learning php and everything else that surrounds WordPress, most of my projects during that time was company/business websites & portfolio sites, including my own website of course; see, I’m always developing on the side, as my main work has always been around the world of “ahensi lyfe” and product design actually.

Yes, I know, I haven’t actually written the “why”; yes, I know that’s a long prologue, bear with me on it. Actually there’s a short answer for “why HUGO”, which is I’m bored with WordPress, and I want to try something new, as simple as that. The way I see it, that HUGO is quite light & powerful, and I get to learn something new again, that’s some sort of fresh air for my ADHD brain! I mean i already know about HTML & CSS, along with all the dinosaur php that’s under WordPress’ hood, while markdown seems like a fun new toy to learn. Another new thing I learnt is that I’m not hosting my site on the common hosting providers, but instead I’m utilising gitlab for that, ain’t that sweet! The only thing I’d need to pay now is just my domain (and yes of course, an email server too, but that’s a different story).

This is definitely a new challenge for me, as there’s no simple drag & drop site builder sorts of stuffs too (I was quite fond of using that as a base foundation when using WordPress), everything is set manually, most of the work is done through terminal & text editors, posts are updated through a git push, etc. tl;dr it’s a fun refreshing journey for me!

Content

Another reason why I changed to HUGO is because right now I want to focus more on writing down my thoughts and not just showcasing my portfolios. Yes, there will be some sort of case studies for sure, but it won’t be what’s dominant throughout the site, it’ll be more text heavy I think. I think I’m at a stage where I need to write more than I design, that’s also something that’s inline to where I am at in terms of career, in which I’m currently in a more leadership role and at a very minimum individual contributor.

So yeah, let’s see where this new site will lead us, as I have a feeling the next revamp will involve IPFS.