From Jekyll to Hexo

The idea of having a blog has been in my mind for a long time.

In fact, I had a blog prior to this one, which was built on top of Jekyll. To be honest, I have tried Ruby many times, but have never felt like it was something for me, or maybe I haven’t really spent enough time to discover what it has to offer.

Either way, I find Ruby and Jekyll to be a little annoying to install and mantain, which is why my old blog was left unmantained.

In this blog post I’ll describe some of the features I search for, and why I chose Hexo.

What I’m looking for

As I said before, I’m not much of a Ruby guy, I spend my days writing Javascript and Python for the most part. I’ve lately become very familiar with the workflow of these programming languages and their tools.

I’m also a heavy Emacs user, and thus I prefer to use org-mode for writing documents and whatnot. It is by far better than markdown, I’m really used to it and the fact that it can be parsed and exported makes it a very versatile markup language for emacs users.

So, in the end, what I wanted was a blogging system that allowed me to write my posts in org mode, preferably not having to export it to anything, and I wanted this system to just work.

Needless to say, Jekyll was not it.

Problems

I will say once again that I’m not a Ruby guy.

I’ll just list the problems:

After every Ruby update, gems had to be reinstalled, because the path to gems got broken.
I had to either write markdown or export an org file to Jekyll, save it and rename it.
I had to manually set the date in the file name for every post.

My problem was mostly with the second point, because I believe that having to mantain two copies of files is a little moronic, to say the least.

The paradigm shift

This past week, Mike Zamansky released a blog post and video on how he blogs, explaining why he moved away from Jekyll to Nikola and it made so much sense to me, because i was having the same problems with it.

At the same time, on one project I’m working on, we decided to move some code away from jQuery to AngularJS, and to manage our dependencies with yarn. To be honest, I’ve never been prone to change, but this change to AngularJS made me think about how the Front-End community is gravitating toward Javascript and RESTful services. I hear there’s even backend servers for Node.JS.

So, in short: The Web development community is gravitating towards javascript (at least in this era) and we should use the tools we feel the most comfortable with.

And so I thought: yeah, let’s ditch Jekyll and let’s build something on top of Javascript.

I have to say I am very comfortable with Python as well, but I feel like I should really get into the Javascript world.

That’s when i discovered Hexo. A quick search in Google led me to StaticGen, which pointed me to Hexo.

Moving to Hexo

Hexo is a static site generator built on top of Javascript that provides every feature I ever desired for a static site generator, and more.

With it I can:

Write every post with org mode and just be done with it.
Deploy to github effortlessly.
Manage it from Emacs.
Learn some Javascript.

And, of course it doesn’t break.

I’ll shortly describe what I’ve added to Hexo to make it work with Emacs and org-mode.

Emacs workflow

I’m sure someone else can explain better how to install Hexo, so I won’t go over that. Instead, I’ll describe how to set up org mode and Emacs to work with this awesome static site generator

I installed the org mode parser:

yarn add hexo-renderer-org

Which lets me write every post with org-mode and Hexo will properly generate the site without me having to export my org mode files.

And, the one I believe is the killer, is hexo.el, an extension for Emacs which allows me to manage all of my Hexo site from within Emacs. Hell, I don’t even need a shell for this now.

Conclusion