Hello everyone!
It’s been a while - I haven’t forgotten you, I promise! It turns out that life tends to get in the way of things sometimes.
As some of you know, this blog had previously been hosted on WordPress for basically all of its inception. I refreshed the blog and updated it in 2014 (losing all, like, 5 posts I’d made in the process), and then largely left it unmaintained after a few months. This is mostly because for a simple blog, WordPress is overkill and a bit of a PITA to maintain - I don’t want to spend my time tweaking plugins and updating software - I do that at my day job. I want to write.
It doesn’t help that WordPress is full of vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited. Sure, they get patched relatively quickly (most of the time) but it still makes little sense to have attack vectors available when they don’t need to be.
I had been looking around at potential blog platforms that use text files for content. This is for a couple of reasons - namely, I want the ease of deployment I get from, say, putting my entire website in a GitHub repo and being able to deploy it basically anywhere. Obviously the extra performance boost is helpful too :)
I investigated a couple of options including Ghost and Hyde/Jekyll, but even these seemed unnecessarily complicated. I want things to be simple.
I wound up settling on Hexo - it’s configured using very simple YAML files for both configuration and posts, and since it’s all plaintext I can keep everything in GitHub and if my web server happens to suffer an untimely death I can simply deploy it onto another VPS and be back up and running in a matter of minutes.
It also helps that it’s dead simple to edit themes and layouts on sites generated using Hexo as well. Since I am lazy by nature, this is always a plus.
I used this guide on Digital Ocean to get it done, and I decided to go with this theme (obviously tweaked a bit for my personal preferences). I also started using Disqus for comments again, which has been loooong-since neglected since I had been using WordPress. Unfortunately this means that all of the comments that were previously on this blog are gone, fortunately it was mostly spam so I’m not too worried about it.
I’ve already migrated all of my posts from WordPress to this new site (save a couple of shorter ones that just didn’t make sense anymore, eg broken links and images), and I’ll be modifying and tweaking this site and the theme over the next few weeks. You know, since I’m always tinkering with something.
A new chapter for this website is beginning - join me for the ride!