I want my blog to integrate with G+ and with other blogs. I want a blogroll. I want better post organization. I don’t want to learn lots of programming stuff, though I do love the customizability and have already customized my site quite a lot.
I’m using Hugo. Hugo is great because you can make it do whatever you want, because it’s a Git thing, and because my blog is basically a mirror of a bunch of text files on my computer, which means I can just write the way I usually do and then sync.
Anyway, I guess I need to migrate to Blogger or Blogspot right? What should I use? Why? Is there an automated way to migrate?
Hugo often requires learning “lots of programming stuff” to do advanced things and customize. At least a couple years back, Google was not very friendly with their G+ API so integration was a challenge, if not impossible.
If you’re set on migrating to Blogger, you should be asking how to migrate on a Blogger support forum, not here.
Regarding what you mentioned, these are Hugo topics:
Post organization - it’s unclear what you want but, there are various Hugoesque ways to organize your posts into sections or types or whatever.
Blogroll - traditionally it’s a list of links to blogs you read, so, you can do this in various ways. You could make it as a bulleted markdown list in a single page’s content area, so you could call it in a template as {{ .Content }}, or, you could use a file in /data for it, ranging through the data and making, say, a <ul> list from that.
I think that you need to explain what this means as it could be all sorts of different things. How about letting us know what you want to achieve and lets see if we can’t then help.
So as far as I can see, the only thing that you want that might be slightly different to most people is to grab any links/references from G+ and insert them to the appropriate page, perhaps in the comments?
This mirrors the several ongoing discussions in this forum about replacements for the Disqus commenting service.
I can see that you can easily retrieve any of your G+ posts so you could incorporate those into your Hugo generated blog (ref. here). But with a quick search, I couldn’t see how to get a list of references from G+ about a specific URL. Though a work around might be to use a general Google search referencing the URL.
Either way, you (or someone) would need to write a query script that ran before you do your Hugo build - you would probably then want to run the combined build periodically (e.g. daily).
Another possible possible option—assuming you want to use said blogroll in a variety of places—would be to include them in a Google Sheet that continually publishes the data to a CSV every time you change a cell (I.e. add another blog roll). You can then use getCSV in your templating to pull those into a layout. If you want to get really fancy, you can hook up Zapier or IFTT to send a webhook to whatever build system you want every time you make a change as well. Lots of options for blogrolls.
I want my blog to integrate with G+ and with other blogs.
If you want your blog to be “broadcast” to G+ and other social networks (WordPress.com, Twitter, Pinterest etc.), have you considered using a 3rd party service to automatically publish your RSS feed?
I’m currently using the free plan on dlvrit.com to post to Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin from my www.forestgarden.wales website RSS feed.
I’m looking at using a paid plan for bulk scheduling but haven’t decided on a provider yet. I’ve been looking at Hootsuite, Crowdfire (no Google+ yet), Stacker and Buffer.
What I would like is to be able to do this all from Hugo but it’s way too much config for me!
