This site has moved from ronn-bundgaard.dk to ronnbundgaard.com. But, not only that. The site is now made with the static site generator Hugo.
Expensive Hosting
Ronn-bundgaard.dk has been hosted on Simply.com formerly Unoeuro.com for many years. However, since Simply.com bought UnoEuro.com a few years ago hosting has become very expensive. The yearly cost of hosting has in 4 years gone from 228 kr. (34 $) to 675 kr. (100 $). As this site is “just” a personal blog and does not make any money I found the price to be too much. I started looking for alternatives. It became clear rather quickly that the only way I was going to save money and have the website hosted for free there was only one solution. And that is going back to having a static site.
I like WordPress
I did not move away from WordPress because I did not like it. I like WordPress quite a bit. I especially like the new Gutenberg page builder. And I in general like the direction that the project has been going. However, I wanted to use a free hosting service like Github Pages and Netlify and that only works with Static Sites. One thing I will not miss though is all the upsell ads in the admin interface.
Why Hugo
This is not the first time this site is a static site. I used the static site generator Pelican for about a year. You can read about that in my article There Is A Pelican In My Blog. Why I at the time decided to move to WordPress you can read in my article Back On WordPress. But, ultimately I worked as a software developer and did not want to deal with building and maintaining a custom website in my spare time. At this time I do not work as a software developer and I do not mind the extra effort to save some money.
Now, why not use Pelican when I already know it quite well? While Pelican is still in development it is not as active as Hugo is. Especially the Themes and plugins are suffering on Pelican. There is almost no development there. In contrast, Hugo is under heavy development and already comes with most functionality already build-in and there are a plethora of themes and plugins for Hugo.
The Theme
I chose the Blist theme for Hugo as it looks and works much like the old site and that is how I want it. I did make a fork of it on Github as I wanted to make a lot of tweaks to improve performance and SEO. And I am sure I will make a lot of visual changes as time goes on. Hugo is built with Golang and the templating language is very like Jinja2 on Python that Pelican uses. So, I find it very intuitive to work with. Blist uses Tailwind CSS. This, I had not worked with before. But, the documentation is quite good and I have been able to make the changes I want without much fuss.
Deployment
One of the perks of using a static site generator is the ability to have the site version controlled in Git as the whole thing is just plain text files. I chose Netlify to host the site as that seemed to be widely recommended. The code is hosted on GitHub and Netlify automatically fetches the code and builds the site every time I push code committed to the main branch. And it is all done from my text editor of choice VS Code.
Final Thoughts
I am at a point in life where I do not write code on a day-to-day basis. I find it a lot of fun writing some code again and having full control of my website. The site already performs better than it ever did on WordPress and if I must say so. It looks pretty good.