Why did I choose Hugo?

Hugo is a static site generator. To begin with all web sites were static. But now we have web content management systems, such as WordPress. Each approach has advantages and problems. Many things are best of their class, provided you choose the criteria carefully.

It's easy to archive a static site. One simply makes a back-up of its files. But to archive a WordPress site, you also need to archive the content of a database, and the software that delivers the content.

That's why I'm using a static site for my personal website. Because I want it to be archival. That's the same reason why I use git to store the source files, from which my site is generated.

But why Hugo? I'm largely a Python programmer, so why didn't I use a Python site generator? Hugo is written in the Go language, something I've never used. Actually, not being written in Python has advantages. The first is that I've no temptation to hack on Hugo, to make it better for me. The second is that I spend some software time outside the Python bubble.

I did some research, and found that for what I wanted, Hugo was the best static site generator. I pretended that I was a WordPress user, who wanted to migrate to something git and MarkDown based. And that I had a small site which, over time, would become big. And that I had a friend or contracter who could provide technical support.

For that use case, I found that Hugo was the best. And so I chose it. And now I'm acquiring skills that I can use to help others. I'm becoming a person who can help others migrate from WordPress, Drupal and similar to the git and MarkDown based static site generator that I'm using.

I wouldn't have that benefit, if I'd treated Python as a safety bubble, outside of which all is danger.