Blog moving to GitHub

It’s the time of year when Wordpress.com is reminding me to renew my subscription and since I really don’t blog as much as I used to back in the days, the price is just a bit to high.

Hosting or not?

I started to look for a replacement service, initially I was thinking of hosting my it on a virtual server somewhere as that’s half the price of Wordpress. True that it would make me manage the server but with ansible that would still be trivial. First I was looking at Linode as the cheapest server was only a cup of coffee and this was reasonable for a monthly price, and on it run Wordpress like I used to when I was really active.

As it sometimes happens, curiosity kicked in and I stared digging into static site generators. And the simplicity they bring was pulling me in. I already use MarkDown for a lot and looking at Hugo made me even more curious if I could run everything from it.

Done and dusted, easy local installation with Brew was screaming go,go, gooooo.

$ brew install hugo

Now the hosting, should it run on my rented hardware or not. After some consideration I decided to try Github pages, for now this will be the solution although I might change that in the future if I want to have a server running somewhere again.

Can it be this simple?

After installing and initializing my site locally I copied my blogposts from wordpress to .md files. The simplicity is just amazing. The biggest headache I had was to find a simple engough theme to use. After some trials I ended up with Etch. It was simple enough and I was able to get the few changes done I wanted.

The use of git and Github is also extremely nice, it just fits in my workflow. Fits like a glove some would say, while we Finns say “Fits like a fist in the eye”. I can keep everything with me all the time, and when I change to a new device everything is seconds away.