For weeks, or even months, by now I have been playing/experimenting with Hugo, 11ty and other solutions. I really like that with Hugo I can use FrontMatter as a CMS to create new posts, add the appropriate meta data, and keep track of what is published and what is in draft form. It allows me to create posts with the right metadata in seconds, rather than having to write the date, time, draft status and more by hand.
For two days I have been trying to understand how to use Jekyll, a Ruby version of Hugo. It is a Static website generator that is similar to Hugo but rather than being written in Go, it is written in Ruby. I find that it renders sites faster than Hugo, but that it has less assistance for creating pages, giving them layouts and the rest. That’s why I experimented with YQ
For those who want to use Hugo, but find post creation and management complicated there is a FrontMatter plugin that should help. This is a plugin that makes it easy to create new posts in the category of your choice. It automatically creates the title, description field, that you need to populate, date, preview, draft status, tags and categories. It displays each post as a block and you can see within seconds whether a post is published, or just a draft.