Giving up on thegrid.io - for now...

So, after 2 years of waiting patiently (basically busy being a dad), and more recently dropping another $96 to keep thegrid.io alive, I finally decided to fire up the Atom editor and port what few posts I had across to Hugo.

I’m glad I did, as going back to creating a website from scratch (rather than letting AI do the job) teaches you a lot about the way the web is changing and forces you to learn new stuff, like Hugo for starters, AMP and Lighthouse.

Hugo let me create a static website in minutes, which meant I could just flip my CloudFront config over to the new site with minimal work required (I still got to keep all my existing HTTP/2 and SSL config).

There’s still a bit more work to do with regard to the theme and adding content (I’m doing it by hand) but already the audit is showing a pretty substantial improvement over thegrid.io generated site.

TheGrid.io - AI generated site

Just look at that performance.

Hugo - human generated site

Not quite 100% - but I’m only human.

Of course, there’s more to a site than just an audit result, and creating the site using Hugo required a lot more typing compared to thegrid.io based equivalent, plus I can’t just change the look and feel with a few clicks either.

I’m also having to upload my site each time I make a change (although I’m automating that using Gulp), and have no app at the moment on my phone to do the same when mobile.

Let’s hope thegrid.io get’s better with the next release, and that my $96 was not completely wasted…