Difficulties of Blogging

Blogging is hard. To anyone who tells you it’s easy, feel free to punch them in the liver, they are lying to you.

I mean, back in the days, when LiveJournal was a thing (or at least a better thing that it is now anyway), blogging was easy and fun - you create a LiveJournal page, and start posting there, making friends, and one day someone will comment your post. Right?

Well, not so easy now.

A couple of years back I had a (truly terrible) Wordpress-based blog. I do remember it wasn’t particularly hard to install Wordpress, nor configure it. A bunch of commands, mysql> create database ... - all that jazz. These days Wordpress is an absolute behemoth, which has exactly one prescribed way of doing things, else everything breaks. Do you have your blogpost in Google Docs and want to copy it to Wordpress? Good luck. It ain’t no Wordpress blocks, it ain’t gonna work. Markdown? Yeah, there are plugins, but .. forget about it.

On the other hand, there’s a growing recognition that blogging is not something that inherently requires PHP, MySQL, NodeJS, Laravel, AJAX, Vue, XML-RPC and RTFM. Actually wait, it does requires a bit of RTFM, but it gets easier.

Blog consists of pages where you offload your infinite wisdom onto your readers, all 3 of them. Pages are, essentially, static (and if you don’t want comments - even more static). And this is where Hugo comes in.

First of all, it’s written in Go. This is already a great thing, and this alone can be a reason to have another look. Second, it’s not even a flat-file CMS: it’s not a CMS at all, it’s just a static site generator. You write your words in Markdown, you run $ hugo command … and you are done.

Really nothing more to it. You then copy files from ./public to your hosting, et voila - your blog has been updated. But it’s not fun that way.

It’s a lot more fun, however, to do things The Proper (TM), Software-Engineering way - that is, to use Git, actions and automatic pipelines. And then use Cloudflare Pages, which in a layman terms means that one of the biggest CDNs in the world is hosting your blog, for you, for free. Better still, Hugo is supported as a first-class citizen at Cloudflare, and wonderful Cloudflare folks put together this friendly guide explainig how to get things working. So, once you finish your post, it’s just …

$ git commit -m "Yet another blogpost"  -a
$ git push
$ logout #KTHXBYE.