I had previously migrated this blog to Gatsby Cloud from WordPress. The process of crafting a blog entry as a markdown file and seamlessly publishing it to Gatsby Cloud by simply pushing it to Github proved to be a significant time-saver compared to managing a WordPress site. In February 2023, Netlify acquired Gatsby and in August, announced the sunset of Gatsby Cloud. This left me in search of a new platform or home for my blog.

As someone more inclined toward Go programming rather than JavaScript, Hugo has always piqued my interest. When considering alternatives for my Gatsby blog, I stumbled upon How to convert a simple blog from Gatsby to Hugo and felt compelled to explore Hugo’s potential as a replacement for my blog platform. My conversion really took no time at all. I didn’t need to change the folder structure for my entries and kept the content/posts/<slug>/index.md structure. I did have to change the file extensions from .mdx to .md. Beyond that, the Hugo Quick Start guide was helpful, as well was Deploy a Hugo site to Azure Static Web Apps. The Set up an apex domain in Azure Static Web Apps article was the last bit that I needed, and I was up and running. The last snag that I hit was an ‘unable to determine the location of the app artifacts’ error messsage on the initial deployment. This answer on Stack Overflow helped me identify that I needed to set output_location: "public" in my github action.

I decided to go with the Anubis theme. I’m looking forward to getting back to writing more in 2024 and discovering the expanded functionalities that Hugo offers.