Migrating my GitHub pages blog from Jekyl to Hugo

It’s been more than 5 years that I setup this blog on GitHub Pages. Technology has moved on and there are a few new interesting options available.

I ended up choosing Hugo because it works well with GitHub Pages, renders static websites at a great performance, offers lots of templates to choose from, and was relatively simple to setup. Its customization though was a bit tricker than I had hoped.

The Clarity theme includes a convenient switching between light- and dark-mode (at the top-right of the page), plus the ability to add topic tags which is a useful feature.

In addition, I wanted to update my comments platform. I had a few issues with Disqus. It wasn’t accessible in China and handled email posting by adding the whole email thread to a post.

The search for the comments platform turned out to be more difficult than the search for a blogging platform. Not that there are no options, but most of them either are not free or they require you to run your own server. I didn’t want to do either.

Enter Utterances which tweaks Github’s issue tracking function to serve as a comments plugin for your blog. To use it you need to add the Utterances app to your blog repository on GitHub. Comments are than added to the site via a simple JavaScript block.

I wanted to migrate existing comments from Disqus as well and fortunately found this neat Python script which did the trick. However, the imported comments ended up all being posted under my username and today’s date. The GitHub API doesn’t allow to change this information.

While I don’t get to blog very often, I like this new setup and look forward to my next post.