In recent years, static site generators have gained popularity among web developers and content creators alike. They offer a simple yet powerful solution for building and maintaining websites that are fast, secure (I am looking at you PHP ..), and easy to deploy. One of the key advantages of static site generators - at least for me - is their ability to work with Markdown, a lightweight markup language that allows you to write content using plain text formatting.
I use Markdown everywhere from writing notes and TODOs, to Architecture Decision Records. It is the perfect tool for structured writing, offering exactly what is needed. Not more and not less.
Over the course of the last years I tried to reboot my blog many times .. and I played with many options available, including Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, and more. All nice but not exactly what I was expecting. Recently I stumbled across hexo and this one ticked all the boxes, except one:
- Focused on blogging, not mainly a bloated CMS
- All batteries included RSS support
- Nice, actively developed theme available (cactus)
- Super easy deployment
What took me like two hours with hugo was done in 10 minutes with hexo. The only downside is: hexo is written in Javascript. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apart from that, now I have my blog content checked into a git repository and a tmux session on my personal server ready for whenever I want to write about anything. I am a happy man!