From Evernote to Hugo

Just to be clear, I still capture all my notes in Evernote :-)

It’s this blog that no longer integrates with Evernote to manage content. I wrote my own Evernote publishing tool last year and it’s worked well for me. Except for the translation between my written content and Evernote’s format (ENML).

Content format

I’d write my posts in a format similar to Markdown. The Evernote app would store the content for me in ENML and my tool would publish the content as HTML. My Markdown like language wasn’t strict or standard and I’d forget the format. This isn’t an issue if I’d written more posts!

I was looking to update the style of my blog and have recently discovered Hugo - a static site generator written in GO. Naturally, a rabbit hole ensued this site was rebuilt!

Hugo

Hugo is a great tool for generating static websites, partly, because content is written in Markdown. Markdown is used everywhere, for me, there’s less chance of forgetting it’s nuances as I used it regularly in wikis and code repositories.

Other benefits

It’s Fast! The live preview and site builder is super quick. And being a static generator the loads quickly. You get version control if you save your site in GIT, and I’m sure someone has tied Hugo into an automated pipeline that generates site updates.

I’d use Evernote

There’s advantages to keeping content in Evernote. To name a few:

• Keeping content in Evernote means I can update it on a number of devices.
• Moving notes between my own personal scribbles, and blog posts is trivial.
• Searching for something in Evernote surfaces results on my blog - which happens surprisingly often.

I’ll try this approach for a while and see where it takes me. Who knows, perhaps it’ll be worth combing Evernote and Hugo in the future.