Moving to Hugo and Netlify
I just moved this website over from my makeshift homemade setup on my self-hosted Digital Ocean box to a more convenient stack. See the very first post here to see what the old stack looked like.
I’m using Hugo with the whiteplain theme, keeping some of the simplicity of the old design. I’m currently hosting on Netlify
It takes a nontrivial amount of work to migrate a website across setups like this. Hopefully, my documenting the tasks I had to get through would be helpful for others wanting to do something similar.
- Migrating each post and reformatting to make sure it works in the Hugo markdown engine
- Aliasing, to make sure links in the old URL scheme redirects to the same posts. I paid more attention to this because a reference to the Twitter clustering post appeared in a book, Practical Web Scraping for Data Science: Best Practices and Examples with Python by Seppe vanden Broucke and Bart Baesens.
- Mucking around with DNS
- Migrating the LetsEncrypt certificates
I’d say the work paid off, though. I no longer have to manage my own Postgres instance and an admin interface to store my blog posts: everything’s managed through Git now. Hugo also makes it a lot easier to do things like reference other posts, tag my posts, arrange them into categories, and more things that I’m probably forgetting.
Netlify also has a great service for hosting static websites and I’m honestly interested with just playing around with it more.