Is it a good idea to create one’s own blog with a static site generator like hugo?
I would say no but it is really up to you. There are really good integrations for blogs with Hugo and forestry(CMS service) stuff they advertise in every GitHub repo
Why do I say “no”?
1-Hugo templates syntax is different than default go HTML templates, it uses a different templating engine to render your HTML templates.
2-Too much convention is imposed on the developer side, you need to know naming conventions like rails
3-They come with TOML or YAML files to configure texts in HTML templates, this could be good or bad depending on your case but for me, I like to keep contents in a markup or js file or store the text in a database system then fetch it every time I need instead of rebuilding your application every time your markup files change.
4- I am pretty much pessimistic person for SSG technologies(especially ones that do JAM stack because everytime you add a page you need to rebuild that) because at the end of the day, someone will ask for a backend then you will also need to build that. Static site generators give you more syntax to nest your HTML templates but you depend on a data source that you locked into markup files. Overall it makes your processes more complicated then it needs to be when you need to maintain.
Where can i say “yes”?
There are performance benefits for keeping your markup content in files with SSGs so you don’t wait for requests from server to populate your web page.
If you are writing boring documentation or your devlogs, there are hundreds of templates you can use without hesitation but the customization could be a pain if the structure needs to change, I like the full control but if you are looking for minimalistic blogs I think Hugo will do fine and you don’t lose time like building everything from scratch(frontend,backend etc)
Who knows maybe you can be very good at using hugo and become one of these theme builders for commercial stuff
Keep in mind, as someone who used hugo 2 times in projects, I am not able to see or provide the benefits for clients. Do I use SSG in anywhere commercial? “no if you exclude nextJS, nextJS provides SSG and SSR(server-side rendering) which is what you need for most of the frontend facing projects”
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