Strutter is out, Hugo is in

January 11, 2016

Sometimes you just have to make up your mind and make a choice. I’ve been working on Strutter, my own blog engine for web folks, off and on now, for almost a year, never really finding the time to finish the last ten percent to make the project presentable. I’ve learned a lot about Ember and I’ve gained more knowledge of both Ruby and Padrino along with working with X-headers and authentication.

Sure it is a lot of fun working on your own blog engine, but the real question is; have I written any blog posts? One, I’ve written one blog post during 2015, exactly a year ago as the writing of this post. In a previous blog post I mentioned a few alternativs instead of building Strutter where Hugo was one of them. Hugo is a static site generator written in Go and it is super fast and quite nice to work with.

I’m rather pleased with Hugo so far and jorgennilsson.com is now running on Hugo and a theme I’ve named Paper. jorgennilsson.se is still running the old Ruby on Rails application, it is not even strutter, but will soon also use Hugo and Paper as theme. Hugo lacks proper i18n support, but there are a few workaround and a quite functional way to do it described in the Hugo documentation on how to create a multilingual site. I tried it out, but I just didn’t like the way it handled the translation strings. Hopefully Hugo will be shipping with i18n support in the future since there are a few good i18n implementations for Go out there.

Hugo shows great promise and I like that you have a lot of control over your markup and it is fairly easy to add an assets pipeline of your choice to handle CSS and JavaScript. The template engine that ships with Hugo is very competent and allows for all sorts of trickery, the only thing that I don’t really like is that it is include based instead of ineherited, but I guess you can’t have it all and there seems to be a few benefits to it as well.

I’m still learning how to really use and leverage the full power of Hugo along with creating a nice workflow that enables and inspires writing, both on desktop, tablets and mobile devices. One thing is for sure, Strutter is out and Hugo is in and Strutter will most likely never be available on any server anytime soon. With that said I’m still keeping the dream of creating digital publishing platform alive. Stay tuned!