In Siriusventures.com now on Pelican 4.11.0 I talked about upgrading my version of Pelican, which went smoothly, and my concerns about Pelican. I really like the interface of Publii because it’s more like Google Docs, with the ability to easily insert images, refer to links especially internal ones, and just the speed and ease of working with it. I have concerns about Publii. I worked with ChatGPT to try and import my other site, running on Hugo, into Publii. It was no problem getting markdown into the right directory and the articles into the right table. I tried a few times to get other tables right and in the end I just entered the articles by hand. That was OK for 28 or so posts but not fun for more than that.
The problem with Pelican is that there aren’t any themes being updated for it. I ran Google’s Page Speed test on my site and it did fine for desktops, in the 90s across the board. I tried Google’s mobile test and I had much more mixed results. I only reluctantly look at the web on my phone but I know I’m an outlier - I just have to look at my family who use their phones much more.
So I bit the bullet and converted my blog posts from Pelican’s flavor of Markdown to Hugo’s. I used the suggested theme, PaperMod, and I’m up and running.
Based on my experience with Hugo, I did a couple of things: one, I pinned the version of Hugo in Homebrew because the pace of development is relentless and there’s a new version every couple of weeks if not sooner. And the other was to clone PaperMod into the themes directory. That means that I have to update it myself but it also means that I don’t have to deal with Hugo or PaperMod conflicting unexpectedly.