I used to maintain a rather clunky blog, which was a mixture of Gulp 4 and Sass, but finally gathered my willpower to move on to a lightweight platform.

• Due to all the heavy assets, the blog template itself (devoid of any content) took up about 10MB. Some parts were brought from a obscure source, so I really did not have a clear understanding of what was going on under the hood.
• Adding a new page was a pain with the absence of an universial template; dealing with all the HTML tags and what not. I wanted a platform where I could easily jot down stuff, not a polished space without any real content.

That was when I ran into Hugo paired with ox-Hugo, a backend that exports Org-mode docs in Emacs to Hugo-compatible MD files. And after my first take, I can’t help but appreciate the convenience!

• The whole Blog repo stays under 1KB, and I can leverage tools like Org-capture to easily create new posts.
• With the below command and some use of autosave setup, you can introduce hot loading to the local development.

      hugo server --buildDrafts --navigateToChanged
  

Anyway, it feels like I’ve finally found a nice and cozy setup. Let’s see where this leads to!