So it’s already 2018, and it’s time to say goodbye to Jekyll, and move on to greener pastures. I moved my blog and personal CV site over to Hugo the new cool kid in the static web site generators block. So far, I like it’s simplicity and fastness. It doesnt have the flexibility of Jekyll, but we’ll see if that will bite me in the long run. In the porting process, to only thing I couldn’t find is a gallery / carousel plugin, because, unlike Jekyll, hugo doesn’t have plugins, so one of my pages is kinda broken. I will have to come up with a custom gallery solution for it some time (which will involve lots of js I am afraid).

While I’m at it, I also enabled HTTPS on my sites, since because it is 2018 already and everything should be HTTPS and Amazon is giving away free SSL certificates to its users. Hurraaay ! Bezos the bestos ! This meant I also had to enable CloudFront (You cant use the certificates with just S3 static websites) so the sites will also load a bit faster now as a side effect. I think I am comfortably in the free tier range yet, so probably all this wont incur any extra cost to me.

On the CI side, I had to abandon my s3deployer gem emblaze and moved on to using s3deploy which is a static site deployer written in Go. I also had to modify my themes to always use absolute paths, because CloudFront can not resolve links like /about/, you have to tell it to load /about/index.html specifically. Which is a nuisiance but not really a game breaker.

From now, I have a mind to re visit my projects and update as necessary, but we’ll see how it goes …