Hugo Vs Wordpress : Wordpress is better except …

May 4, 2020 wordpress hugo [blogging]

Many words have been written about Hugo and how its better than Wordpress. However they’re all written by the technocrati who have no idea how it is for the ordinary. I spend a half day yesterday, on my Sunday, setting up this Hugo site for my blog. I dealt with the intricacies of uploading to AWS with rclone, messing with Cloudfront, going deep into my domain settings, figuring out how to implement SSl(ACM!?) and just when I thought I was done, I found out Cloudfront didn’t forward to an index.html EXCEPT the one in the base directory. From that I went in to find standard-redirects-for-cloudfront and going deep into Lambda and Lambda@Edge. All that so I can be ignored on the web.

It shouldn’t be this difficult. The entire time while setting this up I was thinking “I should have done this on Wordpress and would be done by now”. Alas I am a member of the technocratic elite and as such am prone fits of stupidity in the name of superiority. I went through a litany of thoughts of why I didn’t want Wordpress - “they forced ads on me, I wouldn’t have control over my content, I didn’t want to pay …”.

I went to their pricing page and found that for $4 a month I could get rid of ads and map my own domain. Yes while they do have a draconian content policy - they make downloading your content easy. So it isn’t that difficult to pack up and move to a different host. And while $4 is dollar real money, it isn’t much to spend for a whole month on a hobby you can indulge in without limit.

I envy the ordinary. Their picks are based on ease of use and getting things done. They pick Apple and iPhones and don’t need to worry about backups or being hacked. Meanwhile the tech elite pick Google and Android with poor support and updates. All delivered by a company lacking customer support which randomly turns off services and shuts down accounts.

So here I am bereft of spellcheck, analytics, and a solid interface. I’m editing this in Vi on a budget VPS, previewing with Lynx, and will publish it to AWS with a python script. I’ll save my work with git. Thanks to Cloudfront caching there is no live updates, of course unless I pay. So I’ll have to check back later to see my post on the web. What a pain.