Withknown to Hugo

So I’m considering switching my blog from withknown to hugo.

There’s a couple of reasons for this. Known is good, but fairly complicated. I like all the indieweb stuff, but it all still seems very early, alpha stage stuff. I find it hard to keep up.

I run Known on a VPS, and the latest version will require me to upgrade PHP, which in turn will require me to upgrade the VPS OS. Doing that is bound to break something, which isn’t something I want to deal with right now.

Hugo meanwhile, will run on GitLab Pages, for free. All I do is commit the site changes (a new post, whatever), and GitLab will build the new version with Hugo and serve it up. This is very appealing.

The only other thing I run on the VPS is a name server for my domain. But, it turns out my registrar, Hover, will host my DNS for free.

Now, Hugo isn’t perfect. It really only has one kind of post, unlike Known’s multiple post kinds (status, post, bookmark, photo, likes, etc..) but I think I can work around that. Also, there isn’t really and social network interactions, but again, all that is pretty fragile with Known anyway.

All of this is to say I think moving from Known to Hugo is the way to go. It’ll be easier to maintain, it seems somewhat more straightforward and it’ll all be hosted for free.