Switching to `hugo serve` instead of `blogdown::serve_site()`

Today I came across Dr. Mowinckel‘s blog post about changing her blogdown workflow and decided to change mine as well. I already used page bundles for this site, but always made them manually instead of using blogdown– before reading her post I hadn’t known it was possible to confidure blogdown to do so.

The process also required that instead of using blogdown::serve_site(), you had to run hugo serve in the terminal, which you can do from RStudio. I haven’t tried the forced knitting to .md yet, but since she mentioned that she liked hugo serve better than the serve_site(), I wanted to try it out immediately.

In my case, serve_site() has always been slow, and I didn’t like that it wouldn’t render if I made changes to .scss files. That was no longer the case with hugo serve! It’s much more convenient for me now that it renders automatically, and the rendering time is much faster. If you’re a blogdown user, I recommend you try it!