All along, my goal for the conversion of the last quarter century of blog posts from WordPress to Hugo has been “I want it to be just like WordPress… except not WordPress.”
When it’s put like that, I have to really sit back and ask myself if I really can articulate just what it is about WordPress that I don’t like, as opposed to my site host. BlueHost, I literally cannot stand. They try to scare me into paying them more money with bogus claims about malware on my site and grrr. So mad.
They sent me a marketing e-mail asking if I wanted to be showcased as one of BlueHost’s customers! I didn’t bother opening that e-mail, but I imagine it would have involved me paying them more. And they are not cheap.
WordPress doesn’t suck. It doesn’t lock away my data — they are happy to send it to me any time I like. It was them sending me my backup on a regular basis that meant I still had all my content after I lost the original West Karana site. They have a cool WYSIWYG editor, are very fast, have lots of widgets and plugins and changing themes is as easy as a click.
None of that is true of Hugo. Well, you won’t need to be sent your content as it lives on your hard drive (better back it up because they won’t do that for you!). There is no editor (they suggest a Markdown code editor in Visual Studio Code), images are not handled for you, there are no widgets or plugins unless the theme supports those, and changing themes means none of your previous posts will display anymore.
This has taken the most time. I am fortunate in that I have a program that creates the Markdown posts from the WordPress save file, so I can format those posts any way I like, and change themes by rewriting the post renderer slightly. Once I leave WordPress behind, I won’t have that, either.
No plugins or widgets, so no Metric Clock, or big logo widget, or latest comments section, or a blogroll. Not unless I write them (in Go). I may, just because I can vibe code them. Oh yeah, that WP-to-Hugo converter? Straight vibe coding. And I have another agent working on modifying the theme for me.
Also: no comments. The theme I chose, Tranquil Peak, supports the Disqus comment system and the Gitalk comment section. Gitalk requires commenters to have GitHub accounts. So does Disqus, I think, but you can be anonymous there. And I have read that I can port the WP comments over to Disqus. That said, I might see what else is on offer.
This Tranquil Peak theme is way out of date. Modern Hugo couldn’t process it at all. I have changed it so, so much.
One thing I was able to do is to embed the Daily Blogroll as the blogroll to this theme. It’s live, and it isn’t static. It uses JavaScript to pull it from GitHub and render it here.
I still haven’t addressed creating and editing posts. I anticipate having a staging area where I will use one of the many open-source Markdown editors to create a post, then use a Python script to put things where they need to go and then publish.
That’s some ways down the road map.
I’ve got the visual display just about where I need it to be. Comments is next; creating/editing posts comes after. But with those two things done, I can go live and fit in the other stuff as needed.
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