Converting to Hugo

Since trying to work on building a zero-cost low-maintenance static blog, one of the things I noticed was how constraining Jekyll was about the datestamp being in the filename. Trying to change it afterwards required renaming the file, which confuses NetlifyCMS, and seems all sorts of unnecessary. Yes, I know you can use a more generic collection type now, but the whole point of these is to be very 'blog-aware', and smart about this stuff.

Anyway, I've been meaning to jump into another project, and Hugo impresses me with it's super-fast build time, compatibility with NetlifyCMS, and so I figure I'll give it a try.

First things first, have to get a theme rolling, convert my old Jekyll files into new Hugo posts (mostly just removing the datetime parts of the filename!). A couple of small page edits later, and I'm off! Luckily I don't have thousands of posts to do conversions on (although there are many sites online to help with bulk conversion).

I have already come across the issue with the lack of of plugins (when compared to Jekyll), because I'd like to pull in some XML API data, to build into the site. Hugo supports JSON and CSV natively, but not XML (see this issue for that discussion). For the time being, I'm going to try and solve it by adding a GitLab CI job to pull that data and convert it to JSON, before the one that builds this site. More on that later!