It’s been a while between drinks on the blogging front, but I’ve changed blogging engines. I’m sure that was all that was holding me back :-)
I’ve finally taken the plunge to move to a static site generator. Because I’m on a Node.js bender, I thought I’d move my toolchain to straight Node, and went with Hexo. It happily slurped in all my Wordpress content and converted it to straight Markdown.
The experience has been awesome!
So what’s with the static?
Glad you asked.
I’ve fallen in love with the Web.
Again.
flickr photo shared by tacker under a Creative Commons ( BY-ND ) license
I really want to level up my html/css/js skills, and perhaps explore some of the trendier Material Design aspects. So this somewhat plain template seemed like a nice blank canvas for my explorations.
Modifying site layout and styling – even in dramatic ways – is super easy with a static site generator. And when you’re done, just regenerate.
I have bold plans. Watch this space.
But Wordpress is so awesome!
It’s true. Wordpress is awesome. And I recommend it to people all the time.
But if you’ve ever tried to customise a Wordpress template, rather than just use one off the shelf, you know that the “fiddly” factor is quite high. And to make large structural changes is all kinds of deep-dive.
Then there’s the security issues to deal with (which just all goes away as soon as you go static).
Going static lets me explore just straight html/css/js to generate something quite custom - and I’m super jazzed about it. I’ve already customised some of the layout, created myself a widget, and I’m having a ball.
Too. Cool. For. School.
But the comments, Glen! Where are the comments?
Yeah. Well, there are plugins to migrate Wordpress comments to Disqus, but I’ve found that just taking the discussion to Twitter works better for me.
And it lets the content stand alone without the issues with spam.
flickr photo shared by ianqui under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license
And the toolchain?
I can see why developers really love the static gen process.
Blog posts are just Markdown files. Store them in git for history. Use scripts to autogenerate the final site on checkin. Super lightweight. Super easy.
Here’s how my toolchain works:
- Checkout my blog project from Git
- Store next Markdown file in a branch and commit as suitable (or edit directly on BitBucket if you like, they have Markdown preview!)
- When I’m ready to go live, just merge to master
- I have an Azure script which runs on every commit to master and regenerates the site
Loving it!
Any comments or experiences to share? :-) You can catch me on Twitter