Migrating to Hugo

I’ve decided to bite the bullet and migrate my personal web site to Hugo. My blog was previously built with the Jekyll static site generator and with the Lanyon template, which together have given me a pleasing and minimalist web site. While Jekyll has served me well for many years, I had been hesitant at first to change my web site because there were a few sticking point on my list for a web site update that I wanted to solve before I could change it. I wanted a web site that:

1. supported dark mode (this was an important point for me),
2. was minimalist in the way the Lanyon template is,
3. had a layout that could easily accustom a portfolio and blog,
4. and (probably the most important item) was esthetically pleasing.

After some search I found a Hugo template that fit the bill, the Congo template. Usually what takes some time for me is to configure it the right way, but surprisingly Congo has lots of documentation to personalize your configuration to your liking and many features for the representation of content, and samples of real web sites of users made with Congo, including that of the main author.

I’ve also come to appreciate the many new features that I’ll likely take advantage of in the future, like the support for charts using Chart.js, mathematical notion with KaTeX and diagrams and flowcharts with Mermaid. Overall I feel like this update has made it possible to use use a static website with a whole lot of goodies, many more than what I had just using Jekyll and Lanyon.