Attempting a Move: Hugo to Dev.to

I'm trying to write more consistently. Also inspired by James Clear's excellent book Atomic Habits he states one component of his habit-building framework that really stuck with me

Make it easy

Effectively, he details this as the effort to remove as many distractions and barriers as possible to a habit that you want to form. One way I've done this in my personal life is that I leave Clorox Wipes on the fridge so that they're not buried away in a cabinet, which is a motivator to keep the kitchen counters wiped and clean pretty consistently.

I have previously attempted using many different code-driven blogging platforms such as hosting basic HTML and hyperlinking a bunch of pages, using Jekyll hosted on Github pages, even hosting Hugo on Firebase . I have learned a TON and I do love the control over look and feel.

All that being said, I was inspired by this post to take a look back at this habit and ask myself "am I distracting myself from what I really want to accomplish, which is more creation?"

Hugo Workflow

Keep in mind, this workflow was actually an improvement from previous workflows in terms of removing the distractions from writing and getting it on the Internet.

1. Open up iTerm
2. Navigate to my blog folder
3. Create a new formatted blog post via `hugo new blog/.md
4. Open that new Markdown file in Typora (fantastic Markdown editor btw and will probably be my continued go-to for distraction-free offline editing).
5. If I wanted to add an image, I needed to make sure it was in the static folder and had the correct relative path.
6. Write my words
7. Run a hugo server and jump into localhost on the browser to make sure nothing broke.
8. Build the blog with hugo
9. Make any fixes, including sometimes having to dive into the Hugo theme CSS to fix stuff.
10. Deploy to Firebase
11. Wait for the Firebase changes to resolve and check out the post on nicacton.com

Hashnode Workflow

1. Navigate to Dev.to
2. Hit "Write a Post"
3. Here I am writing this post.

Interestingly, unlike my post on Hashnode, I found images immediately more of a barrier since you effectively upload them and need to insert them via links, and I also immediately hit an image upload size limit from the photo I used in Hashnode, which is interesting since Hashnode actually recommends going over a certain resolution to make your post "look good". Also, I've immediately noticed lack of support for Markdown keyboard shortcuts such as cmd+k to quickly create a hyperlink.

I'm going to attempt this same post on Hashnode, another writing platform I've enjoyed consuming, and see how I feel and where the post goes.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the granularity and control of editing the actual website code and having complete control over the look and feel, but I think it's time for me to focus less on that and more on the actual content and consistency of my writing by removing barriers.

Comments

[Maël Valais]

Hi! Similarly to you, I wanted to push all my hugo posts to dev.to and keep them in sync; I ended up creating hudevto 😅 It is quite opinionated (mostly with regards to where pictures must be), but it might be useful to others!