Why Hexo

Posted on Edited on Disqus: Word count in article: 2.1k Reading time ≈ 2 mins.

When I first set up a blog, I used Jekyll and never tried Octopress.

Jekyll’s framework design consists of two parts: code + generating web pages.

When uploading to Github, only the code part is pushed, while Hexo generates the web pages locally, so it should have some advantages in terms of speed.

The default template also looks nicer, so I switched to Hexo yesterday.

The biggest feature of Hexo, in my opinion, is that it hides all the complicated commands.

With Jekyll, there are at least a dozen steps from setting up to completion.

And for writing a new post, you would have to at least do the following:

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jekyll new post xxx
vim _post/$time-xxx
git commit -a -m xxx
git push remote master

Perhaps for many people, this is already quite simple.

But you have to understand that some people are not tech-savvy. They just want to set up a blog without thinking too much, focusing more on writing.

Having to type so many commands before writing, what if you forget one or miss a parameter? You have to use -h, what if your English is not good? You have to Google it. If it’s blocked, you have to use Baidu. By the time you actually start writing, who knows how many minutes have passed.

And Jekyll requires some understanding of Git, if you’re writing in Chinese, you also have to modify Ruby (utf-8).

Every day, every day, every day, every day, every day!

But Hexo is just ridiculously simple, you only need to know 8 letters throughout the whole process.

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hexo n # new
hexo g # generate
hexo s # server
hexo d # deploy

For non-professionals like me, it’s really amazing to use.

Using Github Pages as a Blog

Finally, I found this place because I wanted to have my own blog a few months ago.

There are many public blog platforms, like Douban, Sina, but none of them are what I like.

I just wanted to find a place where no one knows me, where I can record my weird experiences or thoughts.

QQ Space is the blog platform I’ve been using for a long time, but the people there are all my friends or colleagues. I don’t want to be seen as a lunatic. ^_^

I followed the steps from jekyllrb, and it seemed to work. The webpage went live! My website now has a “Hexo“.

(Now, I’m using Hexo instead of Jekyll)

Actually, a year ago, I heard from a classmate that github can be used as a blog platform. But this task kept getting postponed. I thought there must be a lot of configurations to set up. Not only do I not like complicated things, but I also suffer from procrastination.

English is driving me crazy, and I don’t have enough skills to do this yet.

Translated by gpt-3.5-turbo