«Clearly» the site has changed (as long as you have been following me; if not then perhaps this is «shocking news» for you).

I started the blog with Jekyll and quickly «moved» to Octopress for its «simplicity» to make new posts, pages and change themes; or so I thought.

After some time having to deal with it and then having to create a blog for Log(n)’s employees (being that I’m one of them at the moment) gave me some insights as to how convoluted the process is.

Honestly it felt harder than it should have and made me re-consider my previous choice of static generator.

I started looking and read some good things about Hugo but wasn’t sold on the idea of migrating; the only thing I knew was that I wanted to give my blog a new «face» and that it should be a static website that could easily reside on my Github account.

Back to the «new face» quest I looked everywhere under the sun for new Octopress templates that I would think where «different», clean and obviously pretty… no luck. Mostly all themes for Octopress templates are pretty much the same with maybe 3 or 4 variations and almost all of them are not under my definition of pretty for a website.

After a couple of weeks I gave up; fired up Google with «static site generators» as the search criteria and landed on a page that listed a bunch that you could sort by popularity.

Long story short the top 4 hits sorted by popularity were (perhaps not in that EXACT order:

  1. Jekyll
  2. Octopress
  3. Hugo
  4. Hexo

I already knew the first 2 and wasn’t happy with them; Hugo seemed like a nice option but to be perfectly honest Hexo’s list of themes was what caught my eye.

Without much delay I created a «temp» folder on my computer; installed all the requirements for Hexo and REALLY quickly I had my blog running locally with this new generator.

Took me a couple of hours to fully configure it the way I wanted it to look and correctly setting up my CNAME file for my custom domain (in case you didn’t know this blog is served under http://esttorhe.github.io).

Caveats

There’s only one big caveat I have found with Hexo (which I plan on fixing soon if things go as expected) and that is that the tags point to some obscure tags.html index file that is not generated by the engine; all other «specific» tag pages are correctly generated but the «main» file is not being parsed despite the partial being there.

Honestly that’s a «side effect» I’m ok with for the moment; I’m still planning on fixing it but is nothing major.

Disqus

Another good thing is that Hexo uses Disqus as the default commenting engine (which I was using on the previous instance of my blog) and migrating to the new site was pretty easy thanks to Disqus migration tools.

Conclusion

Hope you like the new layout/design and I’m open to suggestions.

Update

Figured out a way to add support for tags and partially for categories (although I haven’t rolled that out to production).

Will blog about adding support for tags and categories (its more of a per theme basis).

👋