Migrating from Jekyll to Hugo and merging two sites into one

For years I ran two separate Jekyll sites: alexsalom.es as a personal portfolio and swifttalking.com as a blog. Both were hosted on Netlify, both needed their own maintenance, and honestly neither got the attention it deserved. I decided to merge them into one site and migrate to Hugo in the process.

Why Hugo

Jekyll served me well, but I wanted something faster and simpler to maintain. Hugo ships as a single binary, builds in milliseconds and doesn’t need Ruby or Bundler. That alone was enough to convince me.

What changed

The new alexsalom.es combines everything:

• The homepage is now a blog index with all the posts that used to live on swifttalking.com
• The me page has my bio, skills and social links
• The projects page lists everything I’ve worked on, both professional and personal

I built a custom Hugo theme from scratch inspired by the design of swifttalking.com. No CSS frameworks, no jQuery, just plain HTML, CSS and a few lines of vanilla JavaScript for the mobile menu.

Preserving URLs

One thing I cared about was not breaking existing links. The old swifttalking.com posts used a /:title/ URL structure, so I configured Hugo’s permalinks to use :contentbasename which generates slugs from the filename. Every old URL still works.

Comments with Giscus

The old blog used Utterances for comments, which stores them as GitHub Issues. I switched to Giscus which uses GitHub Discussions instead. Setup was straightforward: enable Discussions on the repo, create a “Comments” category, and drop the script tag into the post template. All the config lives in hugo.toml and gets injected via a Hugo partial.

Migrating comments from Utterances to Giscus

Utterances stores comments as GitHub Issues. Giscus uses GitHub Discussions. They are different systems so existing comments don’t carry over automatically.

To migrate them I used the GitHub GraphQL API via the gh CLI. First I listed all issues on the old swifttalking.com repo that had comments. Then for each one I created a matching Discussion on the alexsalom.es repo and replayed every comment in chronological order, preserving the original author attribution and date in the comment body.

One gotcha: Giscus matches a blog post to its discussion using a configurable mapping. I used og:title, which matches the og:title meta tag against the discussion title. This keeps discussion titles human-readable while avoiding mismatches with the full <title> tag (which includes the site name).

Automatic deploys

A netlify.toml at the root of the repo tells Netlify everything it needs. Every push to master triggers a build. The site is live in seconds.

The result

One repo, one site, zero maintenance overhead. Writing a new post is as simple as creating a Markdown file in content/posts/ and pushing. Exactly what I wanted.