Hello Again, Hexo

Fine, I choose Hexo again, just like how I switched back to Ghost after transferring between so many options. Hexo is still the Hexo I know, but many things have changed at my side. For example, my English level?

What The Hell Is Going On?

Well, since I started re-arranging my blog, I was trying to split my blog contents into two streams, technical stuffs and other shitposts. For the shitpost part, I decided to use Ghost after all. Everyone knows WordPress nowadays is too heavy-weight and complex for a blogger, while static website generator is just too complicated for me to update some casual rubbish. Ghost may be the best choice of dynamic blog programs in this case. But for technical stuff, I want to keep things simple.

I thought TiddlyWiki will be suitable for that need, although I’m not a fan of Wiki. As a result, I can’t remember the syntax of TiddlyWiki very well, and its support for Markdown is very crude. So, I decide to turn back to static website generator now. When dealing with codes and commands, pure markdown works so nice. Comparing to fancy programs like Ghost, static websites also have more minimalism and cool themes. Anyway, every programmer is using that, and factors once driving me from static website generators have changed:

• Awful CLI. Okay, I’m using macOS now. With iTerm, oh-my-zsh and Homebrew, everything about CLI becomes so elegant and comfortable. I don’t need to deal with disastrous cmd.exe any more, and Microsoft is also trying to solve those history problems of cmd.exe and powershell.exe through Windows Terminal.
• Lacking of a good Markdown writing software. As I switched to macOS, that problem is solved too. Thanks to Setapp, now I can use Ulysses with a cheap price to writing comfortably from local, like what I’m doing now.

Now we can see, most problems disturbing me were from Windows. However, everything changed since I’m using a Mac now.

But, Why Hexo?

Yeah, I considered one other generator, Jekyll. The most popular choice always comes with the most active community with lots of resources, especially themes. I found many cool Jekyll themes like:

• Klisé
• Dark Reader

These two (and the author of the last one) are so sexy, but when I installed Jekyll and was trying to initialise my gorgeous tech blog, the documents frightened me. Jekyll is very general to be able to hold any kinds of static websites, even like a product landing page, but this kind of freedom makes me feel uncertain. Another reason is that I’m not familiar with Ruby and Gems, while Ruby is a built-in component of macOS. I don’t want to mess up my computer with running too many commands I don’t actually understand.

But for Hexo, I used it before. Although most Hexo themes are not that beautiful as Jekyll, I still find some good ones. Hence, hello again, Hexo! Hope we can start another good journey.

Localhost — Dec 3, 2020