My old wordpress blog has quit the service. Without consultation. Suddenly I could no longer log into the administration area under ninety.de. The first best debugging tips from the net turned out to be a waste of time. I denounced this while kicking Wordpress into the garbage can instead of asking ChatGpt*the cocky chat bot of the not-so-new startup OpenAI, which is a topic for another time for help. The greed for more simplicity and security was awakened. Thankfully, ChatGpt*Transparency regarding the use of ChatGpts and other AI text generators may be expected from this blog. pointed me to the popularity of static page generators for blogging. The question remained, which is the best static page generator? MkDocs? Hugo? Gatsby? ChatGpt was not particularly opinionated on this. My list of requirements read as follows:
- Easy blogging in Markdown
- Easy support of multiple languages
- Good representation of code
- Integration of small JavaScript apps
- Representation of mathematical formulas
- Simple design
- Open source
- Show footnotes on the spot tooltip-like
I quickly decided to go with Hugo without understanding exactly why. Hugo’s suggested theme Ananke was not plain enough to my eyes. After some searching I found Papermod and it was able to tick all the boxes. Client-side rendering of mathematical formulas is easy to configure in Hugo. Server-side rendering, which is more efficient for the blog visitor, is apparently not trivial to implement in Hugo. Some people were even motivated to change generators*Hexo is an alternative static page generator with better support for server-side rendering. Hexo is based on NodeJs and uses the package manager NPM, which I don't like very much. Hugo is also only implemented in Go and not in Rust but at least it doesn't need NPM.. I converted the old posts via Python script from the Wordpress-MySql database*accessibility of the admin area didn't change magically to Markdown.
The fact that since then I can write articles in the text editor of my choice and no longer have to rely on Wordpress’ content management system is a big win for me.