Hello Hexo!

We have bounced around the blog platform space forever. I actually remember the moveable type generation of blogs. We eventually ended up in an endless permutation of Wordpress. Sometimes it was hosted for us. Sometimes it was hosted by us. But we inevitably ended up back at Wordpress.

A while ago we started converting our less active websites to Jekyll. We have been ruby people forever, so it seemed like a natural fit. Now that we are doing most of our active development in Javascript/React it seemed like a good time to re-evaluate our choices for the site.

Enter Hexo

It seems well built. It uses a node environment I’ve gotten really comfortable with over the last year. There are a bunch of plugins and themes that made it really easy to migrate over. We were able to slurp out all the content from our existing Wordpress site and jam it into a repo. Now we can deploy out of there.

It is obviously still very early in the process, but I have to admit I’m already impressed by the migration. Not only did Hexo provide tools to easily move the data from our old WordPress site, it also had a bunch of plugins that made it easy to replicate features we used on Wordpress.

Maybe now that things are easier to work with I’ll get back in the habit of writing more about the technology we are experimenting with.

Some Notes

We used version 3.3.0 of Hexo. It has a file type problem (Someone saved it with the wrong line enders for Linux.) They are supposed to be republishing soon.

Old habits die hard. There are a number of plugins for deploying Hexo sites We already had all the kinks worked out of s3_website so we are still using it for this. Which means I have both ruby and node working on this site. I figured it was more important to kill Wordpress than ruby - so I’ll leave that as a todo.

I never really learned markdown. I’m getting a crash course in how to use it over raw HTML…