The main piece of tech that I maintain myself is this blog, so I usually find time to play with it, try new technology such as Docker.
Unsurprisingly, this has led it to be a little over-engineered, and I wanted something simpler. Why was I trying to figure out how to configure a database in a container for a blog that only I was maintaining? I didn’t need CMS-like functionality, if anything I needed a static site.
Enter Hugo.
Hugo is a way of generating a static site from markdown files, so it can be deployed without having to worry about configuring a lot of moving parts.
I’m looking into how I can easily move my old blogs content to a new Hugo instance, and I’ve discovered there’s already a lot of existing work to do so. In fact, the official Hugo docs have a migrations page that has a list of ways of migrating from other blogging platforms to Hugo (eg. Jekyl, Wordpress, Octopress).
So I’ve been playing with using ghostToHugo to pull my old data out and move it to a new location, as well as playing with some Terraform to setup the whole thing in AWS, with S3 as a storage backend, fronted by CloudFront. Not only will this make the ongoing maintenance a lot easier, from what I’ve seen online it’ll save a big of money, as the storage costs of CloudFront fronted static sites is a few cents.
