👋 Welcome to my tech & lifestyle blog! I'm Pablo – passionate about tech, creating websites since '16

Moving from hugo to writefreely

Below, you will find my reasoning for the change of my blogging system from hugo to write.as.


Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Time consumption

To understand why I got frustrated with hugo I’ll first explain how it works.

With hugo you configure a .yaml file with settings like your blog’s title, description and some other options like language and theme.

Then I would go on and create a new blog post as a markdown file locally on my PC, which sounds cool, and it kinda is, but in the end I was just frustrated and couldn’t remember all the shortcuts.

When I was done writing I would open a terminal, head into my projects folder and run “hugo”. Now I can move all the created files of the public folder into a new repository that I can eventually use to host my page on codeberg.page.

You can see that this was just a lot to post an article on my blog.

Furthermore, I have never been done customising my blog’s design. This took a huge amount of time — even more than writing posts. Changing colours, customising the mastodon comments to look exactly the same as the matrix comments, inventing a pop-up which warns users when they click on a link that would redirect to an external page and so on…

Downtimes

I started tracking downtimes of my blog and realized that it went offline almost every day — even if only for a few minutes, this frustrated me. I’m not writing stuff just to find it not to be available and eventually loose potential subscribers, am I?

Fediverse Integration

Many users of RSS —which was the only way to subscribe to my blog— are elderly people, aren’t they? Though I am young (in comparison to those RSS users) and would expect younger people to subscribe to my content.

Write.as adds functionality for e-mail newsletters and Fediverse integration out of the box. I know that most teens are using this so-called “Instagram” and “TikTok”, not sure what that stuff is… Anyway… They can now pick their preferred way of subscribing!

Tracking

While I do write this blog mostly for myself, I find myself wanting to know if articles are actually read or not. I don't need any personal details like browser version, exact location, mouse clicks, and so on. Not interested in all of that. It's like when a company releases new products, they want to know how many they actually sell, not solely to start reproducing this product when everything is sold out but also to understand which products users enjoy (compared to blog posts) and which can be withdrawn from the market.

That’s where write.as’s analytics come in handy. Just a simple view counter for every post and a summary of the last days. Perfect! Now I can ditch goatcounter :D

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