Here’s my hot take on using the Front Matter area in HUGO’s markdown documents to add content to a post. Front Matter should only be used for post settings. Shortcodes are meant to make adding recurrent special content to a post easier. Yes, that’s the shortcodes, not the front matter.

Enabling the comment section in a post, disabling the image resizing, setting the post as a draft or not. That’s ok. But if you use the Front Matter to add videos, or anything that belongs to the content part of the article. You are just breaking the whole purpose of using markdown and standardized formats to maintain a webpage. If you want to change theme, or view the file in another markdown app, a part of your content is now lost because it’s not living in the content area.

Finally, I’ve had enough and decided to get rid of Git, GitHub, and continuous integration to manually upload this site, generating the build from my local machines. When you learn to use Hugo, everywhere you look, you’re shown how to do a deployment with GitHub, but I think all of that is too much for the needs of most people and ends up increasing the technical debt that you constantly have to carry when maintaining the site.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s environmentally sustainable to have to deploy a container or VPS every time you have to do a build when those tools are already installed on my machines. We’ll see how long I last with this setup, but for now, something simpler seems appropriate.

After so many months using Hugo I got to say, I love it, it’s been fun and I have learned a lot BUT… yes. BUT. It’s not as easy to use as it was “promised” or at least how easy I thought it was gonna be. Themes are just OK, most of them are very basic and with incomplete or broken features. A big chunk of them are ports from basic themes from other site builders. Everything has had to be tweaked and customized in most themes I’ve used so far so that they function semi decently but I’m still far from being an expert in web dev and HUGO to really feel as free as I want to. I wish more dedicated designers and developers joined the community so we could get a “just blog and it does most for you” experience.