As a far too occaisional blogger the thing about your blog is that it has to require minimal work to maintain. With Jekyll that's mostly been true. As I host on github pages I can easily merge in the occasional dependabot alert and for the most part it does what I need. However the one wrinkle is that as an emacs user I prefer org as my text file format. Markdown's good. Org mode is better. In order to facilitate that I've used the package org2jekyll. So I wrote org files, ran org2jekyll's publish and it spat out HTML for Jekyll. Easy 😄. The problem I eventually ran into was that org2jekyll has a configuration that is relatively complex. And eventually one update too many upset the apple cart and caused a bug in org2jekyll that stopped it working.

So I had two options, lean enough emacs LISP to debug the issue or see if there was an alternative. I'd heard a few people discuss Hugo. After a quick look I got very excited, native support for org files. Pretty much a killer feature right there. So I decided to see if I could convert the blog to Hugo. And I could, and it was quick.

• The basic action was to run a hugo import. Cracking outcome. Working Hugo blog in under a minute with my old blog posts all intact. But they're HTML files. So could I convert them to the org source files? Yes again. I moved the org file from static/org to content and there I had it. i did need to tweak a couple of things:

  1. The format of dates with times is a little off. Your options are to remove the timestamp or remove the spaces and add a separator of T between your data and time. I also added the timezone by adding +11:00 to the end of the time.
  2. I needed to reintegrate utterances as my comment engine
  3. #+TAGS: became #+TAGS[]:
  4. A bunch of the front matter became redundant as it was for org2jekyll
  5. I needed a github action to publish my blog

I think I owe a debt of gratitude to ardumont for org2jekyll and to the Jekyll community in general. But so far I'm happy with the move.