Moved the blog from 11ty to Hugo

What should you do when you’re busy and have been spending too much time on your blog lately? Why, dive head first into a completely unnecessary SSG migration, of course!

I had Hugo on the brain last night for somewhat valid, somewhat flimsy reasons:

• I used Hugo in the past and liked it.
• 11ty’s fast, but Hugo’s wicked fast.
• I’ve been writing more Golang code lately.
• While I’m fine with JavaScript and enjoy TypeScript, relying on npm feels dirty these days with all the supply-chain attacks. Hugo is a single, batteries-included binary that does not rely on third-party packages.

With these thoughts in mind, I dipped a toe back into the Hugo pond this morning, liked the feel of it, and before long was wild-eyed and neck-deep in migration. It’s now about 3:50 pm, and I think most of the core stuff is working in Hugo.

Here are my very hasty thoughts on what I like better:

• The local dev server has a flag that controls whether drafts are included or not. I don’t think 11ty has this. I had to write some custom code to be able to run the dev server but exclude drafts locally.
• The dev server seems to reliably start and stop in an instant. The 11ty server gets stuck sometimes, taking a long time to exit.
• I love that Hugo boilerplate leans hard into partials. You can accomplish the same thing with 11ty, but it felt less clear which way is most idiomatic.
• I like that Hugo’s shortcodes are stored in html files instead of JS functions.
• Hugo has native blocks! 11ty says you can use the Nunjucks template-inheritance feature, but it doesn’t work with 11ty’s native layout flow. In my experience, anyway.
• Dates make more sense to me. 11ty forces dates for everything, and it’s really hard to tell whether a page has an explicit date or just the auto-computed date that 11ty imposes on it. I burned a bunch of time wrestling this because I wanted my notes to be undated.
  • Edit: To be fair, 11ty forcing me into dates made me realize that maybe I do want them after all.
• Nitpicking, but defining the nav menu in the hugo.toml config file is clearer to me than how 11ty does menus.
• See above re: single binary.
• See above re: wicked fast.

11ty’s great, of course. Hugo’s just more my vibe so far.

I’m out of time and gonna hit the deploy button. Fingers crossed.

Backlinks

• An RSS oopsie, props to Pablo at powRSS
  I made an oopsie and two wonderful people took the time to alert me.
  August 4, 2026
• Finding my draft posts with ripgrep
  Ripgrep is the best.
  August 5, 2026