It was simply because the Jekyll theme I was using before, a modified version of much-worse-jekyll-theme, doesn’t build anymore. Actually, no, that’s not quite right. I updated some of its npm dependencies which caused it to not build anymore. It’s using quite an old version of Ruby, including most of its dependencies, that I’ve been receiving a lot of warning emails about vulnerabilities from GitHub. Instead of potentially spending a lot of time just updating the build itself, I’d probably be better off moving to a ready-made, more modern templates/themes. I knew about Hugo and a quick search of its free themes led me to choose Will Faught’s Paige theme, which I quite like due to its very simple look.
The migration was actually quite quick. I only copied my previous _posts/ folder into the new content/blog/ folder and added some of the needed front matter which was simply done using good ol’ grep + awk.
While I really liked the look and feel of my old site, this new one is also quite good. And Netlify’s support for Hugo is quite solid as well so less build headaches for me. Hopefully, for many years to come.
Thank you OSS and free services.