More than twelve years ago I wrote about rebooting this site from WordPress to Jekyll. Back then the blog was already seven years old, and the move felt like a necessary cleanup: static files, fewer moving parts, and a website that asked for less care and feeding.
Today I am doing the same thing again, this time moving from Jekyll to Hugo.
The motivation, however, is a bit different. In 2014 I still thought of this place mostly as a blog. The design, the feeds, and the mental model were all centered around posts. That made sense at the time, but the web has changed and so have I. Short updates moved elsewhere (X/Facebook/LinkedIn), professional profiles multiplied, and the material I want people to find first is no longer necessarily the last thing I wrote.
So this reboot is less about starting to blog again and more about turning diogogomes.com into a proper web presence. A place with an about page, research, projects, publications, supervision, and enough connective tissue to make the rest of my online identity easier to find. The blog is still here, and I still like owning my words, but posts are now part of the site rather than the main reason for the site to exist.
The funny part is how easy the technical migration ended up being.
Moving from WordPress to Jekyll was a project. Moving from Jekyll to Hugo was still work, but this time I had AI as a very capable pair programmer. It helped translate templates, adapt content front matter, migrate the small tools around the site, and keep track of the details that usually make this kind of move tedious. The work was not magically done by itself, but the friction was much lower than I expected.
That is probably the biggest difference between the two reboots. The first one was about escaping a heavy system and learning a new static site generator. This one was about reshaping the site around what I need now, with better tooling and a lot of assistance for the boring parts.
I do not know if this means I will write more often (History says otherwise) But I do know this site now feels closer to what I want it to be: a small, durable home on the web, with the blog kept alive as an archive and as a place for the occasional longer thought.