How I Revamped My Blog: Migrating from Hexo to Hugo with AI Assistance

Eight years ago I built my blog with Hexo and the Landscape theme, publishing 236 posts of technical articles and occasional life notes.

Over time Hexo showed limitations: poor multilingual support, themes that couldn’t list projects or resumes, reliance on many plugins for comments, reading time, word count, dark mode, and the inconvenience of storing article content and images in separate directories.

We can’t let a €30‑per‑month AI subscription go unused!

Recently I discovered the Hugo static‑site generator paired with the Blowfish theme. With the help of GitHub Copilot and my OpenAI Plus subscription, I decided to completely migrate my blog to Hugo.

Home Page Comparison

Current home page (supports both Chinese and English)

Previous home page (no bilingual support)

About Page Comparison

Current About page

Previous About page

New Pages Added

Miscellaneous new pages

New portfolio page

Upgrade Considerations

If you have a large number of posts, create a new repository (e.g., new‑blog) and set up Hugo + Blowfish first.

Then migrate Hexo posts; I used Copilot to write a script that converts Hexo markdown to Hugo format.

Use ChatGPT or similar AI to generate article cover images.

Use Copilot to copy the generated covers into the appropriate directories based on article topics.

Pros of the Upgrade

Resolved the lack of multilingual support.

Added built‑in article search functionality.

Provided better navigation and page layout.

Article content and images are now stored in the same directory, simplifying management.

The Blowfish theme includes many built‑in features such as comments, reading time, word count, eliminating the need for extra plugins.

Cons of the Upgrade

Old article URLs were not mapped to the new ones, affecting SEO.

Previous comment data was lost.

The migration and adjustment required a significant amount of time.

Conclusion

The migration took three evenings to complete, but the resulting blog is far superior to the previous setup.

Without AI assistance the process would have consumed even more time and effort.

Nevertheless, as reliance on search engines declines, the visibility of technical articles may diminish, potentially turning them into mere training data for AI.

Regardless, having a personal writing space remains valuable for IT professionals to record and reflect on their work.

I will continue sharing my learning and work insights here, along with observations from living as a programmer in Eastern Europe.

Read the original article at: https://shenxianpeng.github.io/