I’m testing out Hugo, a static site generator. It reminds me of the early days of the web when you set up a host and install content management software like Movable Type, Greymatter, or Textpattern. I spent hours tweaking those systems. I’ve spent less time fiddling with Hugo thanks to ChatGPT, my patient teacher.

More than ever, owning your own content is important. Sure you can set up a Squarespace or Wordpress site with easy but you can just as easily lose access if you post something the don’t like. All the content for Hugo is generated locally and then posted to Github Pages

The files are simple Markdown text files that can be read by virtually every computer operating systems ever invented and even those yet to be invented. There’s no lock-in. It’s a file over app philosophy.

Funny that everything comes full circle. I’m back where I started: a CMS I control, text/html files, and my corner of the web.