January 4, 2026
Static shock or static bliss?
Jeffgeerling.com has been Migrated to Hugo
Beloved blogger ditches heavy tech for Hugo—fans cheer, veterans warn, detours to Zola start
TLDR: Jeff Geerling moved his blog from Drupal to Hugo to escape maintenance burnout. Comments split between cheers, regret over Hugo’s theme breaks, and a Zola escape plan—plus side chatter on version pinning and those Safari extensions.
Internet handyman Jeff Geerling just flipped his blog from heavyweight Drupal to speedy Hugo, and the comments lit up like a holiday tree. After years wrangling an “enterprise” Digital Experience Platform (think: big corporate website machine), he wanted a simpler life for a passion project. Cue the cheer squad: “Welcome to the other side!!!” cried one fan, celebrating the move to a static site generator (a tool that turns posts into fast, simple pages).
But not everyone’s baking celebratory cookies. One veteran dropped the regret bomb: “I regret it,” blaming fragile themes and Hugo’s frequent changes for constant tinkering. Another commenter said they’re bailing entirely—moving from Hugo to Zola, arguing its templates just make more sense. So it’s not just Team Hugo vs. Team Drupal; there’s a surprise Team Zola running onto the field.
Meanwhile, a practical crowd turned the thread into a mini workshop: “Pin your version,” advised one, suggesting tools that lock Hugo’s version so updates don’t break things. And in true internet fashion, someone fixated on the real mystery—“What are those three Safari extensions?”—because there’s always a side quest. Bottom line: Jeff wanted less fiddling, more writing, but the community’s split between freedom, frustration, and finding the next tool.
Key Points
- •Jeff Geerling migrated his website from Drupal (versions 6–10 over time) to the Hugo static site generator.
- •He prefers Hugo over Jekyll for self-hosted sites due to simplicity and speed, and because he is not a Ruby developer.
- •The migration is tracked in a GitHub issue; some broken images and URLs are expected, with redirects added where possible.
- •Hugo’s native Markdown support aligns with his writing workflow, which has used Markdown since 2020.
- •Publishing on Drupal had become operationally heavy, involving image management, date adjustments, and cache purges via Ansible, Nginx, and Cloudflare, exacerbated by DDoS-related caching needs.