On moving preparations

A short break from the usual posts for a bit of site news: by the end of February, I’m hoping to have completed the move of this site over to a static-site generator called Hugo.

There are a few reasons for this.

First, I’m ready to leave Squarespace. It’s not that there’s anything really wrong with their service. It’s pretty reliable, their customer service is great, and it’s generally pretty easy to use. It’s just that it’s overkill for what I need (a simple blog), and while they’re constantly bringing out new features, those features aren’t really of interest to me—the features I would be interested in paying for just don’t seem to be rolling out.

Second, while some basic customization is available to base-plan users, it just can’t compare to the level of customization available to a roll-your-own, hackable, static-site generator.

Third, Hugo will be the basis for another project I’m slowly putting together, so this will be good practice.

While I will probably be re-architecting the way URLs are set up, Hugo has an awesome built-in feature for handling redirects, so all the old links should continue working. Comment will probably go away, which is fine, because there really aren’t many. Going back to Disqus is an option, but I’m really interested in Civil Comments too.

I’ll follow up when the move is complete.