My Blogging Pursuit with Hugo and WordPress

Widening My Horizons

Ever since joining the Fosstodon.org instance on Mastodon as my main “Fediverse residence” in mid-2023, I have discovered many amazing personal sites, weblogs, and online representations from skilled and interesting tech-oriented people people.¹ I have subsequently taken a lot of interest in building a blog and developing skills in my growing tech stack, so that I can make BurgeonLab my “main home” on the World Wide Web.

Now that I have dabbled in Hugo for almost two years, I am feeling way more comfortable with customizing themes to my liking and adding little features here and there. But I still have a lot I want to do with BurgeonLab; which is why I decided to write this post to reflect a bit on my blogging journey thus far, and the challenges of managing multiple blogs.

Discovering Webring Communities

Update: In Q3 2025, I took my first step and joined 512KB.club with my site clocking in at 440kB (uncompressed, as of 2025/10/02). I also joined Darktheme.club and CookieZero! I’m quite happy with the web badge (88x31) collection…

While browsing the websites of people I’ve come across on Fosstodon, I noticed many were part of webrings. This word vaguely triggered old memories of going on the Internet as a kid in the 90s (cue that modem sound). I had no idea these still existed…oh, my ignorance! After refreshing my knowledge on the current webring situation, I found a site that has a pretty extensive and up to date webring directory curated by Ray at brisray.com. Thanks Ray! Here are a few I’m interested in checking out, in no particular order:

• CSS JOY Webring - For those who like to mess with CSS
• Meta Ring - For those who craft their site and write about it in a /meta or /colophon
• Geekring - For geeks with non-commercial sites
• Fediring - For fedizens with personal sites
• No AI Webring - For sites without AI content
• Netloop - For anyone with personal sites
• Webmaster Webring - For anyone with websites
• Octo Ring - For GitHub users
• Bucket Webring - For cool people who like to make things

Many webrings have a requirement that the sites have to be hard-coded but I think some allow for static sites by generators; I’ll need to double check. I don’t feel ready to join any yet, but it’s definitely something I am working towards.

IndieWeb

As for IndieWeb (I am still wrapping my head around it); from what I understand, it’s a movement/collective focused on how one’s content shouldn’t be locked in a proprietary platform. By using independent, self-owned websites to share content without using centralized platforms; ultimately, we can avoid enshittification. IndieWeb promotes personal identity and content ownership which I vouch for.

“When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.”

— https://indieweb.org/

There seem to be multiple components of IndieWeb and I suggest reading this recent (2024) detailed guide written by bacardi55 and an older one (2018) by Amit which can explain it better than I can.

Some CMS (content management systems) have built-in IndieWeb features:

• Microformats—a type of HTML markup that identify structured data used by IndieWeb
• Webmentions—receiving notifications when a URL is mentioned/links to it
• POSSE (i.e. “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”, allows siloing (cross-posting) content to other social platforms from your own site. Here’s a discussion about it on Hacker News)
• IndieAuth

Here are a few Hugo² themes that has IndieWeb features:

• Plague
• MinIndie
• Quint
• Neofeed
• Indigo (last update in 2020)

Further research is needed for me to decide if I am heading down the IndieWeb route. There’s an insightful post by Chris Mcleod that talks about the possible downsides of using features like Microformats and possible privacy issues with webmentions.

Multiple Blog Situation

In the opening paragraph, I mentioned that this site is set to become my main blog, but it didn’t start out that way; and I’m not entirely sure if it will remain so! This realization only hit me about a month ago after I made some significant changes to the two blogs I’m currently managing.

For quite a while, I had been dividing my social media accounts for various purposes: one for general content (eclecticpassions) and another dedicated to my photography³ (APERTURE2IRIS). It’s only now, with the addition of this tech-focused blog (BurgeonLab), that I’ve come to see splitting up my primary interests (general topics, photography, technology) into separate handles might have been a mistake. Now I’m juggling multiple accounts and domain names without knowing what the best approach is. Maybe one day I’ll consolidate everything into one central location?

Recent Blog Fever

What inspired me to make significant updates to my two blogs was when my friend chose to launch his own photography blog. He experimented with various content management systems, but I couldn’t persuade him to go for a static site generator; he preferred something user-friendly with a WYSIWYG GUI editor that’s widely used and didn’t require coding skills. In the end, he opted for hosted WordPress. To my surprise, I found that I could help him out by answering most of his questions about WordPress! It turns out all my experimentation paid off after all!

WordPress Beginnings

My first “proper” blog (i.e. using my own domain instead of a third-party platform like Tumblr or WordPress.com) was established when I snagged a multi-year, managed WordPress hosting plan from Hostinger a few years ago during Black Friday. I got a domain name that matched my Instagram handle since that is where I’d built up most of my social following. I originally wanted to bridge my short-form content on Instagram (as I often hit their character limit) into longer, more comprehensive posts; and possibly trying out affiliate marketing as I have always liked researching and comparing products.

As I explored all things blogs, I started learning about not only WordPress; but also SEO, page speed optimization, keyword research, and website best practices, etc. The list of things to learn was never ending, which overwhelmed me when what I really wanted to do was just write content. In the end, I have not gone through with that plan at all and I regret to say there’s not a lot of content there. I blame myself for choosing the wrong CMS and I dug myself into the WordPress rabbit hole.

Hugo Saves the Day

What did happen was I learnt how the WordPress backend works, DNS, caching, best WordPress plugins (for my use case), getting posts ranked on search engines and optimizing for fast page speed scores, etc. Learning all this made me realise I should have went directly to a static site generator (SSG) like Hugo at the start! In my experience, SSGs are easier to manage, faster than dynamic sites, more secure, and lightweight to list a few pros. Sure, there is a slightly steeper learning curve, but it gave me a chance to learn a lot of other skills like using an IDE (VSCodium), being more comfortable with using the terminal, understanding the basics of Git/versioning, using languages like HTML, CSS, JSON, TOML, YAML, and GO.

Which is why I think I am now leaning towards making BurgeonLab my main blog as I find a lot more joy when messing around with Hugo, being able to write offline on my device of choice, using my IDE or Markdown editor instead of the horrid UI/UX and clunky in-browser WordPress editor. It’s just very unsatisfactory when I am writing there; I can’t describe it

Last of the Blog Trio

Finally, the photography blog was born out of a need to replace my Adobe Portfolio site. I’ve been meaning to publish it earlier this year but it has been delayed. I will try to prioritize it next as I have worked on the other two enough, for now! With a lot more Hugo experience than the beginning of the year, I am confident it’ll be a pretty painless job, especially with a more developed theme like Blowfish. Really looking forward to writing about photography topics like transitioning from Adobe Lightroom to open source photography software (Darktable, Digikam) and setting up a portfolio section all within Hugo.

So do you also have multiple blogs? How do you manage it? Will the pursuit of the perfect blogging setup ever be final?⁴ Let me know what your views are!