It’s been nearly a decade since I last logged into Blogger, where I originally created this blog. It had a great landing page which linked to my Google+, and Twitter… needless to say, it was time to update the site, so why not the platform too.
I was looking for an excuse to play with static site generators, so I decided to migrate this blog to one. I reviewed Astro, Eleventy, Gatsby, Hugo and Jekyll. Any of these would have worked and share many similarities, but I found myself drawn to Hugo.
There is a surprising number of articles and comments on the Internet which reference the few pages I’ve posted here. So, keeping the URLs of the old pages was an important step for me. I expected to setup a .htaccess file with some rewrite rules to redirect the old URLs to the new ones, but Hugo has a built-in feature for this. It’s as simple as adding the aliases to the front matter of each post:
aliases:
- /2013/08/fortiap-11c-14c-and-28c-remote-setup.html
The selection of themes was surprising, lots of high quality options that were easy to test drive. I chose PaperMod which was simple and straight forward, worked well on desktop and mobile, and had a nice dark mode.
Creating the site was essentially running a couple commands at a terminal, on macOS:
brew install hugo
hugo new site blog --format yaml
git submodule add --depth=1 https://github.com/adityatelange/hugo-PaperMod.git themes/PaperMod
Overall, I’m very happy with the migration. It took me less than an hour, and the resulting site looks great. I learned more about CommonMark and static site generators.
In the migration, I decided to start fresh with reader interactions. I value the engagement on previous posts, but I’ve chosen to move forward without migrating the comments. I’ve also disabled comments on future posts and have removed any kind of analytics on the site for now. The Blogger site had Google Analytics:
