+ new post about the switch to hugo

content/posts/hugo.md

@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+---
+title: Building my Blog with Hugo
+description: Why I'm switching away from simple bash scripts
+category: article
+draft: false
+date: 2021-08-17
+---
+
+For a while now I've been using `pandoc` and a combination of shell scripts to build and deploy my site via a gitlab CI/CD pipeline.
+Given that I want to start sharing my site to more people I realized I need a way to generate some meta data for each page.
+In order to this I have to somehow:
+
+* Tag each page with meta data that other sites can look at
+* Make sure the build system is aware of this new meta-data
+
+Inserting meta data into posts and page source code isn't too hard but there is the problem of standardizing a format which meets my criteria of:
+
+* Easy to write
+* Easy to parse
+* Preferably not verbose to keep things small
+* As robust as possible
+
+That last one is the part that makes this really hard to implement if I'm being honest.
+Yes I could come up with a format and use something like `sed` or `awk` to replace markdown with inline HTML and do some wizardy on the compilation script to `cat` partial html files together properly but...
+After having already done similar things for other projects I know exactly how painful that can be, especially to do it well.
+
+
+
+## Why Hugo
+
+1. Instant support for yaml meta data in each markdown file
+2. Pages are built out of go-templates with javascript
+3. Templates
+
+It's literally just the templates.
+The fact is I have two templates that I care about right now: `posts` and `index`.
+
+> What about styling and making sure you don't lose the charm of the site?
+
+I can literally re-use the same style sheet from before with Hugo and fonts can also stay where they are.
+No Javascript is ever compiled and sent to the browser.
+
+> What build advantages do you get from this?
+
+Robustness. I can build out tons of pages in reasonable amounts of time with no mysterious errors and have a ton of flexibility when it comes to adapting templates to be something new.
+
+> Aren't you locked into a single theme this way?
+
+Yes but most people's themes send a ton of Javascript which I don't want to do ever
+
+> Can I see what the theme looks like?
+
+Sure: [click here for the theme](https://gitlab.com/shockrah/shockrah-city/-/tree/master/themes/shockrah.xyz)
+
+
+