Switching from WordPress to Hugo and GitLab pages

For many year I used WordPress for my website/blog. I was never really happy to write in the WordPress-editor. Often the editor screw up my code snippets and it feels like MS Word, which I always have a bad writing experience. WYSIWYG editor’s is not my preferred way of writing and it never will be. I want to blog more but I don’t want to use the WordPress-editor anymore.

I’m a programmer

I’m a programmer and I prefer things like markdown, rst, etc. to write my content, because with that technology I can focus on the content and not fighting against the editor. I also want to use my daily coding editor VS Code, because I like it and I want to to everything in it because I feel really productive with it. I know things like hugo, the static site generator, for a long time, but I don’t want to generate the static content and then copy it via ftp to my server. So I could use GitHub pages for that, but I don’t like to put my raw code (for the blog) into the public and I’m also not the biggest fan of GitHub’s approach to use a special branch for my release-control. And then I’ve tried out GitLab pages.

GitLab pages

GitLab pages is the easiest way I can think of to publish static site content. With it’s great GitLab-CI system you can do nearly everything you like. It also use a special CI-job name to publish my content and so I can use every branching strategy I prefer. I’m also in general a big GitLab fan, because I use it heavily at work and so it feels like home.

Hugo, GitLab pages and VS Code

Starting with that post I will use VS Code to write markdown, use GitLab pages and hugo to get my html and publish it to my website. All controlled via git. I’ve ported my old blog posts to markdown and now I have my new website/blog.