Why I am blogging with Hexo

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Symbols count in article: 2k Reading time ≈ 2 mins.

Why ‘blog’ at all?

Isn’t blogging dead? Relatively speaking, yes. And yet the winner-take-all attention economy that those of us in the internet-connected world occupy has given certain blogs tremendous power. E.g. Wired did a fine profile of Italy’s Five Star movement and the crucial role that the Beppe Grillo blog played in their electoral success. I regularly read blogs and have learned a great deal from some of them. I have no illusions that my blogging will make a substantial impact on the world; my aims are much more modest.

  1. Share works in progress or ones that may never be published formally
  2. Post my mandated travel reports for the professional development events that I attend
  3. Keep my Markdown and JavaScript chops somewhat up-to-date

Site Generation With HexoJS

This site is made using HexoJS, a fast & powerful static site generator framework powered by NodeJS. I’ve made sites by hand in the past as well as used WordPress, when I realized I wanted to get some draft scratchpad content out publicly, neither aforementioned option sounded appealing. Coding by hand was too much maintenance coupled with decision fatigue, something I’m particularly prone to. WordPress is serviceable but I wanted to host it using freely available low overhead web hosting options and also be able to migrate easily if necessary. A quick web search on these criteria turned up HexoJS.

HexoJS Advantages
Hexo blogging is done in Markdown, which is easy to write and super portable in the event that a blog post needs to be repurposed into a webpage elsewhere or other format such as PDF (via simple steps with Pandoc or Python). All Hexo pages are static HTML/CSS/JS which are super fast (particularly once minified) and able to be served via any low overhead cheap/free webserver. My employer offers a bare bones webserver which still delivers the content beautifully and quickly. In the event that I need to migrate to a different server I could do that quickly and should development on HexoJS ever cease, all my content in Markdown is transferable with minimal headache to any other Markdown-based blogging platform, such as Jekyll.

My HexoJS Setup

A note here to myself and anyone interested in HexoJS