New blog site: From Jekyll to Hugo

I while ago I wrote about purchasing my own webserver in digital ocean and hosting my shinny applications. Last week I finally got some time to migrate my blog from Github to my new domain, www.msperlin.com. While doing that, I also decided to change the technology behind making the blog, from Jekyll to Hugo. Here are my reasons.

Jekyll is great for making simple static sites, specially with this template from Dean Attali. It was easy to set it up and host it in Github. My problems with this configuration are:

• With Jekyll, all posts in the blog are created as .md files and not as original .Rmd. For every post with R code I had to compile the .Rmd file to .md and manually add figures and other files to the site directory. In Hugo, and using blogdown, I can compile it directly from Rmarkdown (.Rmd).

• The Jekyll template in msperlin.github.io is very clean and simple. This is exactly what I needed at the time. Hugo’s template academic is specially made for academics and offers lots of new functionalities.

• The github internet address doesn’t fell very profissional. I know this can personal opinion but a custom url tells me that the author has spend some time and money to set its webpage properly.

• There is a lag between writing changes in files and seeing it live in msperlin.github.io. This can get annoying. With my own domain, all changes are instantaneous.

Hosting the static website in www.msperlin.com is very easy. I wrote a simple bash script that compiles the site locally using blogdown::build_site() and copy all files to my server with ssh. Going further, I also added documentation about my CRAN packages using pkgdown. See an example for PkgsFromFiles here.

I am very pleased with this setup and I hope that I won’t need to change it in the next couple of years. The transition is a lot of work! I had to recompile all Rmd posts and copy and paste all other textual content.

If you are a teacher or researcher, you really should look into Hugo-Academic. This is specially true if you use R, as you can integrate you Rmd files with blogdown.