To get Hugo off the ground, I used the Chocolatey package manager to install the software. Using a pre-compiled version turned the normally annoying process of tweaking the npm install process into a single line: choco install hugo -confirm.

From there I followed the quick start, adding a theme and then creating a first post. Hugo doesn’t really care what content is in the content folder, but it does use utility sub-commands like hugo new posts/my-first-post.md to create a mark down file with some meta data. Once you have some content, you can run hugo server -D and it will watch the files in your system for changes and update them in real time. This gives it a bit of a feel of a content management system, with none of the deployment work.

From there you can just update your FTP or other deployment (I’m just doing a FTP copy with “update if newer” set) and the blog’s content is available. With this little friction, I think I can start posting content without worrying about the headaches of Drupal of old. Of course, static site generators can use full content management systems and turn them into HTML as well, so for more advanced sites such a strategy would be interesting. But for now, zero friction updates is the key.

From here, the next step is to add the configuration from Hugo-Octopress, the theme is I have selected. It is minimalist and looks similar enough to my old site that it is comfortable.