Is Hugo Worth Using For A Blog

This blog is built on Hugo¹ and uses the hugoloveit² theme. The three main drivers for choosing this technology has been:

Being able to self host the blog
Minimize the need to customize style
Minimize the time spent coding and maximize the time spent writing

The first two points has been stellar. This blog can be hosted on about anything. It is currently being hosted on deno deploy³ but is not vendor locked. Hugoloveit is the only style used; there’s not a single css file checked in the repo⁴.

Unfortunatly, this site is a collection of hacks on top of Hugo. The time spent fighting with Hugo has been insane. The only reason why this blog is maintainable is because it uses nix to bind everything together. Here is a list of hacks done to Hugo.

Added a custom transform function to be able to subprocess in templates⁵
Created 1 partial for the comment section ⁶
Created 5 shortcodes ⁷
Created 2 sections ⁸
Generate 1 config file programmatically ⁹

Consequently, for similar use cases, Hugo will not be magical. The author of this blog has no significantly better solution to propose.