I’ve made the switch over to hexo for my page. I’ve used weebly for years now and I loved it for it’s ability to quickly crank out awesome content using a drag and drop builder. However, I’m a web developer and I find myself often fighting weebly.
For example, on weebly I had my portfolio website written with Ember js but one day it stopped working when weebly changed how it includes javascripts (like jquery) into the source - this ended up breaking the site. I decided then that enough is enough. Time to make the switch. For a while now, I’ve been interested in front-matter Markdown-based blog systems like [Jekyll](http://jekyllrbb.com], Hexo, Sculpin, Ghost and a few others.
After some research, I chose Hexo for it’s ease of use. Jekyll looked nice but honestly I’m not a big fan of Ruby so that steered me away from it. I use Laravel a lot and OctoberCMS looked bad ass; however I wanted just static pages that I could host my blog on github pages like a pro. I’ve been doing this web thing for almost 20 years now and the only thing that has stayed consistent about the Internet is html, javascript and css. Thus, that’s what I want to build.
I don’t want to spend a bunch of time with server administration. I’ve been blogging since 2000 - geek on the 5th, lamegeek and a few others and after those blogs died, I swore I would never setup another apache server. Why? I spent more time playing with linux and apache and frankly I just don’t have time for that shit anymore. I didn’t do backups of those servers and they died when the server that was running in some dude’s closet fsck or formatted. I didn’t care enough about the content to go back and restore either.
Code snippets
The things I write about are usually pretty technical in nature so I’m pretty content with this setup. Now I can do code snippets like all the other cool kids.
$foo = FooFactory::createWithBar();
$foo->hookedOnAFeeling('High on believing');
WSIWHAT?
I’ve added hexo-livereload so I can get automatic page refreshes while I’m updating - so I can see how my markdown parsed on the page. It is a really nice setup I am really enjoying.
SEO
I’ve ported over my old blog posts over which took some time to get it out of weebly but it is worth it. I’m sure to lose some search optimization I’ve gained over the past few years but that’s okay. At least now I have my pages statically listed and I don’t have to worry about them changing yet again. :smile:
I love the way it generates static files - it’s all setup to be SEO friendly.
Comments
I’m going to use disqus for comments on my blog. I really enjoy getting feedback from people about my blog posts, it gives me warm fuzzies deep down inside
What about Dynamic Content
Javascript, duh… I’m a badass web developer, don’t forget it holmes. ^_^
Hexo rocks!
It took me about 30 minutes to really dig into hexo and figure out it’s internals. If I ever want to switch in the future to another technology, I just need to publish my static html content and then start from there. And I’m pretty content with that. It’s not like weebly where if that site crashes, I’m stuck without my blog and portfolio website for ever.