Here I go again, back to Hugo for this site.
I’ll write soon on all the reasons why I’m moving back, for the most part it’s just due to how truly awful WordPress has gotten these past few years at handling simple tasks like writing blog posts. That’s not new though and it didn’t negate the fact that I couldn’t come up with a blogging workflow that worked well for me, particularly on my iPad. I think I’ve fixed that.
If you’ve followed my site for a while the theme should look familiar. It’s the same Hugo theme I used up until July with some very minimal tweaks. Instead of updating the visual look, for now, I focused on making a workflow that works for me and I think I’ve got it. Here’s how I can write a post now:
- I create a draft.
This is done with either VS Code task, Make target, GitHub Action or, soon to be, iOS shortcut. With a click I have a draft with all the frontmatter sans date. The file is named with a timestamp and stored in content/drafts on my site. This I can work with anywhere I want.
I write
I promote the draft
The second step uses the same methods (VS Code task, Make Target, GitHub Action, etc) to promote a draft either “now” or “later.” If the former, and I only have one draft, the scripts take care of everything (move it to the proper folder, rename it based on title and date, add date frontmatter and converts draft frontmatter to “false”). If Latter I have to specify that publish date and it sets the publish time to 08:00 CT. For the scheduled posts I have a deployment task that runs daily at 09:00 CT to publish any drafts for that day. The only catch is that if there is more than one draft I have to specify the filename of the draft, but that’s not hard to do at all.
That’s it. Last time I used Hugo I had given up on drafting posts like this as it was just too much of a pain to do so. Now this works as easy as, if not easier in some ways, than WordPress.
Given I now have more time in general that should mean I’m setup well to move forward with this site in 2026. I do want to update the theme itself and then I want to just write and not worry about the rest. I think this will do that for me.
Over the coming weeks I’ll follow this post up with a few posts on how my workflow actually works with Hugo as well as why I’m giving up on WordPress even for personal blogging.
It’s funny, I really thought “WordPress would be better” this last summer when I went back to it, but that’s because I simply hadn’t invested in fixing my workflow. In pretty much every other way I do think Hugo is the better option for blogging today and I’m grateful to be back with it, now with a workflow that should work for me as well.