Migrating to HexoJS
I’m trying out a new blog platform again. Over the last 15(!) years I’ve run this site on a few platforms, including WordPress, Mambo, and ExpressionEngine.
I know WordPress has always served me well. But it was time to try a static blogging platform. Oddly, for the first couple of years I blogged with a static blogging platform. I created posts by adding them to an HTML file. Yes, I was writing raw HTML like an animal. In Notepad++ or Dreamweaver or something like that. So, now we’re back to that level of sophistication, except I don’t repeat myself in the HTML process. Blogging without generator software resulted in manually creating pagination links and an archiving mess.
Hexo takes care of all of that. And even supports importing wordpress posts. When importing the WP XML file Beware of "s in your titles. Those need to be manually removed from the XML file.
INFO 1455 files generated in 28 s
Not bad.
I was able to use my existing Heroku account, and even the same application. Heroku made me upgrade to the latest stack before it would let me deploy (I was still on Cedar 10). I can’t decide if I should deploy with the hexo deploy command or using dropbox integration. I’m going to try the hexo deploy command. It seems like it takes a long time to regenerate because I have 1400 posts in my archive, so that’s not optimal. Oh well, I like learning new ways of doing things, and the ability to write my posts as local markdown text files makes it fit into my existing workflows really well.
PS: My fear of digging into the internals of my wordpress installation for themeing and such was another reason to move to a system that I can understand a little bit better because it is built in node.js.
PPS: Also, the hacky fork of WordPress that I used for… exactly 3 years (What’s up with February!?) to host this blog for free on Heroku started getting pretty far out of date. So here we are.