My Formula One blog ported to Hugo

About the blog

This is a blog I ran from late 2005 to late 2007 about Formula One in Spanish.

I enjoyed a lot writing my previews and reviews about the races and occasionally some commentaries about news.

During that period the blogosphere was a nice place to be. There were some other blogs about the topic and the major blogging and media companies were not yet there trying to get all the attention -and they did-.

I grew a small community around of friends that every Sunday read the reports and commented on them.

But finally I lost interest, not really on writing but on the sport. Call me a nostalgic, but the races were not anymore as I remembered from my teenage years and suddenly I stopped watching them, there was no reason to keep the blog running.

About this version

This blog was hosted on my Wordpress server, hosted in a shared VPS somewhere in a dark data center full of blue and red flashing leds.

But running Wordpress is cool if you use it every day and keep it updated but having a site that is almost static, without content and comments anymore is too much to justify maintaining such infrastructure nor paying for a hosted solution.

So....

Porting to Hugo

...I ported it to Hugo.

This is not meant to be an example of nothing because is my first attempt with this static site generator and my first approach to Go but allowed me to do some things that were hard to do with Jekyll -which I use for my personal programming blog.

There's not even a theme directory because some parts are not very reusable but vestiges of my old Wordpress site that I wanted to mimic.

Things that can be useful to someone trying to learn Hugo from example:

• The archives. They are made with taxonomies, so I had to put some frontmatter on every post describing the date and month. A bit awkward but the result is fine.
• Comments from data: There's a big comments.toml file that I use to extract the comments for every post, and worked pretty well. I extracted them from the Wordpress export XML.
• Tag cloud. Weighted by popularity, trying to emulate the one that I had with Wordpress.
• Singular taxonomy names: This one is tricky, see the config.toml file for details.
• Data for mappings: Categories and tags are mapped with data to keep the old urls exactly as they were.

Thanks for reading!