It took no time at all to set up and deploy a Hugo instance to my VPS. It’s currently hosted at lukebarnard.co.uk/blog. It provides a lot of the features I was missing with journal such as support for tags and storing the post date in the metadata (“front matter”) of the blog post file.

As for the design, creating a theme was easy. I started by using the “Blank” theme and modified the templates and CSS until the site looked a lot like my personal site. The difference with Hugo and my personal site is that Hugo is statically rendered whereas my personal site is written using React and includes the content bundled in the main app bundle. React isn’t a great choice for statically rendering lots of managed content - it’s geared more towards exposing services with APIs that return dynamic data to the user. It’s not impossible to write a blog site using react by exposing blog content via an API, but I wanted to focus more on posting content as opposed to building something that already exists.

So far, Hugo has been incredibly simple to set up and modify to my specifications. The final result will need tweaking but for a first version, this is miles beyond what I thought I could get done in half a day!

I’ll hopefully be posting a lot more content now that I’ve got an easy mechanism by which to deploy new blog content, which is my ultimate goal.

In future I also want to integrate a chat system based on the matrix protocol, but we’ll see.

Thanks for reading!