After some fun with Haskell while trying to get Hakyll to work how I wanted it, I decided to pursue some alternative static site generators. The final straw was realizing how often I’d spend just searching Github for hakyll and checking random public blog repos hoping they were using the features I wanted to implement. If you’re not aware, there are quite a few static site generators out there, each with their unique quirks and feature sets.
I finally settled on Hugo mainly due to it’s out-of-the-box feature set; from the outset you can get a fairly fully featured blog, complete with next/previous links, an RSS and sitemap XML, and a bunch of other neat things. As usual, to get Gitit and my blog-engine-of-the-week get along, small modifications had to be made to both Hugo and Gitit, but these are the types of changes I could probably submit as pull requests if I felt the need, being so small and (as far as I’ve seen) free of adverse effects.
The migration to Hugo also gave me the ability to integrate some cool Material Design effects, mainly the neat shadows seen under certain elements. I’ll likely continue working on my modified version of the default herring-cove Hugo theme to integrate any more fancy features I come across.
All in all I’ll say I’m quite impressed with the speed, flexibility, and features of Hugo so far!