A brave new blog

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I always enjoyed the idea of keeping a journal where ideas, tips and tricks from my daily life could be shared. With this first post I intend to move forward this goal. By sharing knowledge, you grow a bit and help others improve. It also helps you to keep motivated, giving you a sense of purpose since you feel that you are contributing to the community.

The Hexo Framework

This site is built using the awesome hexo framework with a slightly customized version of the Cactus Dark theme. In the light of the open source movement, you can find the source code of this site in my github account.

The hexo framework is a fast and simple static site generator. Rather than generating dynamic content depending on the user request, a set of raw content is matched against a set of templates and styles to produce the final static content, that never changes over time. This has some advantages such as simplicity and speed, since there is no need to perform complex queries to complex backends to retrieve and build the content that the user is requesting.

Walkthrough

In order to get started you need to have the Node.js package manager (npm) and the version control system git installed.

Setting up hexo:

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$ npm install hexo-cli -g
$ hexo init mysite
$ cd mysite
$ npm install

Installing the cactus-dark theme: 

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$ git clone https://github.com/probberechts/cactus-dark.git themes/cactus-dark
$ npm install hexo-pagination --save

In your config.yml file, change the theme setting: 

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theme: cactus-dark

Start serving your new site: 

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$ hexo generate
$ hexo serve

Head over to http://localhost:4000 to see it in action! After this, go ahead and customize it to your needs. There is a basic folder structure that you have to keep in mind.

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├── _config.yml - (configuration settings) 
├── public      - (static files, which may be deployed to a live server)
├── scaffolds   - (pages and posts will be based on these scaffolds)
├── source      - (raw source content of your site)
└── themes      - (custom themes of your site)

Deploy:

The last step is to deploy your generated static site to a remote server and start serving it. In my case, I simply push the public folder to my github repository.

For more details, head over to the great hexo documentation.