I've changed the static site generator that powers www.gergel.im. In this post, I explain the motivation behind this change, describe a few issue I had during the setup, and finally spend a word about my new workflow for content creation.
The time I dedicate to Racket is too small by now, so for a while I have decided to drop Frog, the generator I've been using until recently. Also, since my interest has switched to JavaScript, I thought it would be a neat idea to find a JS-based generator. This is how I ran into Hexo.
I have grabbed the opportunity to transform the website more into my presentation to the world, stressing the fact that it's my personal page.
Migrating has been painfully manual, but also surprisingly straightforward. I blame especially my laziness. For instance, for each post, Frog requires a front matter in the form (notice the 4 spaces in front of each line):
Title: A good title
Date: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
Tags: tag-1, tag-2, ..., tag-n
To comply with Hexo's format, I needed to switch to yml (notice the termination with triple-dash and the change of date format):
title: A good title date: YYYY/MM/DD hh:mm:ss tags: - tag-1 - tag-2 ... - tag-n --
Only after doing it maybe fifteen times (I have roughly 25 posts) I started thinking about how vim could help me speed that up.
I spent a bit of time trying to figure out how to lay out the folder structure so as to have a blog inside a website. This can be achieved by using the index_generator[path] property in _config.yml, while keeping the root to my webpage to /:
url: https://www.gergel.im/ root: / index_generator: path: 'blog' per_page: 10 order_by: -date
Apart from this, laying out the files was pretty easy.
I deploy the website using the git deployer. This takes the content of the generated public folder, copies it into another folder (don't know why), and pushes it to master. To also keep track of the source files, I created a develop branch. This means that I don't control master from my machine, but rather let the deployer push to it, and from time to time I just pull from my repository to have a local master in sync. I don't even need to do that, since I won't make any manual change to this branch. The only reason it's there, actually, is that GitHub Pages for users require that the content in master be rendered (unlike project pages).
My workflow for writing posts is now the following:
develop (usually I'm there already)hexo generate --watch to generate files when changing anything in the repositoryhexo server to check the resultssource/_posts/a-title.mdAt this point, if I go to localhost:4000/blog/<permalink structure>/a-title/, I can see the resulting page. When I'm happy with it, I do:
git ci -am'Some message'hexo clean and then hexo deployThe resulting code is stored on GitHub, feel free to inspect it in case it might help you with your own setup.