Shagun Agrawal

Switching from Hugo to Bear Blog

After much yak shaving, I have moved my personal blog from Hugo to Bear.

Before I go on, do note that I 100% recommend using Hugo to anyone for making their own personal blog. After reading A Developer's Guide to Blogging by Robert Johnson, I finally plunged and decided to make a personal blog, and use Hugo. It's a no fuss solution, fast, lots of features, various community templates and so on.

Start out with archie but now like typo more ?, it's as easy as switching the theme in hugo.toml. You can even switch to the bear theme itself !

Unfortunately it's not that simple. Each theme has a different set of features. Some might have built in solution for analytics, some won't. Some might have dark theme, but for others you will need to modify and override css manually. Sometimes there are unique features implemented by individual theme authors, such as disqus comments, custom fonts, etc.

Again if you have a theme which you like, and don't want to change it and are happy with the set of features by your theme ( or want to contribute to the theme back ), Hugo is more than enough. Along with Cloudflare pages which can deploy your site on a git push, it's a very simple and straightforward solution to start your own personal site.

Unfortunately, I kept switching themes. I wasn't happy with exact set of features of any one theme. I tried to add some functionality to the themes, but I was unfamiliar with Go and it would have taken quite long to properly test, create a PR and so on.

Although Hugo is simple to use, I also wanted something more convenient, which has a specific set of features baked in. I had also shifted to Bear like theme mentioned above, so design wise I wasn't changing much.

Some major plus points:

And I was already sold on the design, simplicity and ethos.

As my Hugo based blog only had few posts, and only 2-3 pages, migrating my site was not time consuming. I followed the migration guide. I do expect a few links to break, but that's okay. Not a big deal.

Now I should probably focus on writing more posts. Although I did find a new SSG written in Clojure ...