I have been useing Hugo and promoted it among my friends for last few years. It works great, super fast, and very easy to navigate between laptops since I just need to drop hugo binary in my PATH.

However, Hugo gains tractions and add so many features which I don’t need and I feel overwhelm. I started to think of building a very minimal, simple tool to generate Go template.

That’s how Baja is born. It has a few concepts:

• No pagination: I hate to click around, especially with static site. It’s so fast that I prefer to ship an index page contains everything.

• No messing around with config file: I don’t want to have to create any config file to write a blog. All I want to say is, here are my markdown, here are my template, give me HTML. Of course, some advanced features need config such as deployment

• Easy and Flexible theme: Let’s say I have a file call project/baja.md. I want to use a different template from normal article, instead of manualy define layout. All I want is simply create themes/project.html or theme/project/baja.html.

• Deployment: I want built in deployment for rsync and kubernetes. That’s my 2 main use case where I host my site.

• Asset: A static site still need some CSS, and time to time I have to do thing like ?v=1 to force refresh CSS. I don’t want to add JavaScript transpiler to my tiny blog. In the past, I used some bash tip to convert the CSS path by appending its md5 hash. I want that built-in now.

You can view the source of this website

• theme:
• content:

If you think baja may fit your need, give it a try. Download the baja from Github and get writing:

To generate based theme and skeleton folders:

baja init

To add a new post:

baja new notes "from hugo to baja"

When you write, preview it:

baja server

Then visit http://localhost:2803 and keep writing. The content will be re-build when you made change.

When it’s time to deploy:

baja deploy

If you don’t like baja, it mayne a template that you can build more feature on top of it.