From Vanilla PHP to Hexo

I have had this website for less than a year, and I’ve been wondering what to do with it.

Until now, it has been just a small dynamic website where I put my work in progress and my most advanced projects, along with a little description of myself. I used a single PHP page that retrieves data from a bunch of .json files. Not gonna lie, I love developing this little thing.

But in the end, it wasn’t enough. I want to do more with this website.

So I searched for a blog engine, and I have some requirements:

  • Not a big blog engine; WordPress and others are not for me. I just want to share text and links, and using them would be overkill.
  • I want to write blog posts and pages with Markdown, which is much easier than direct HTML editing or a WYSIWYG editor, at least for me.
  • I want it to be easy to install and maintain, for obvious reasons.
  • If it can generate a static website, that’s even better, but it’s not a strict requirement; I can do without this function.

After looking at some engines - like Jekyll and Dropplets, the two main contenders - I decided to give Hexo a try. On paper, it checks all my points, and it has a lot of really cool templates too - I ended up using the Cactus theme here.

The installation is straightforward, five command lines in a terminal, and you’re good to go.

1
2
3
4
5
npm install hexo-cli -g
hexo init blog
cd blog
npm install
hexo serve

Your blog is now running on localhost:4000, and a ‘Hello World’ page welcomes you, with all the instructions you need to create posts, generate the static files, and so on.

The configuration file is about a hundred lines, and the main items are easy to configure without the documentation (I wonder what title, in the Site section, will do…), but for the rest, the documentation is really clear.

There is additional configuration for the theme you chose, even if you want to keep the original one.

After generating some test blog posts and testing some themes, I finally decided to go with Hexo and the cactus theme for my personal website. It checks all the requirements I had, and it is easy to understand, set up, configure, and maintain.

If you are wondering about which blog engine you want, and your requirements look like mine, I recommend you to give Hexo a try.