Moving to Hexo

re Moving

Moving to Hexo

Just a heads-up for anybody who subscribes to this blog via RSS or ATOM. Sometime within the next week I will be migrating this blog from Pelican to Hexo. Pelican has served me well the past several years, but it is starting to cause enough problems that I want to try another static site generator. Pelican is a little awkward to run under Windows. For Python programs like Pelican, I typically install them inside of some form of virtual environment like virtualenv or an Anaconda environment. This means I have to remember to switch environments which I usually forget to do until I get strange errors trying to work with Pelican. Managing the plugins and themes is also somewhat different. I do not change either very often, and I end up having to read the documentation every time I want to add or update something. The final reason I am moving away from Pelican is it is rather slow. It takes a good 30-40 seconds to regenerate the site every time I hit save in my editor. This is really painful when experimenting with page layout for a new article.

After trying out a few different static site generators, I have settled on Hexo for the next version of my blog site. Hexo is a Node.js application and is a much smoother experience on Windows. During development, my site can regenerate in 3-5 seconds, which I really like. Plus, plugins and themes are all managed through npm which makes it easy to keep things updated.

The one downside to Hexo is it will not allow me to have both RSS and ATOM feeds. Going forward, the site will have an ATOM feed and a new JSON Feed. I am going to have automatic redirects configured that should route requests from the old feeds to the ATOM feed. Most feed readers that I know of understand both RSS and ATOM, so this should be seamless for most readers. I have a test post queued up for next week after I make the move, so if you are not seeing new content by then I would suggest manually updating your subscription.

Hopefully this will be a relatively smooth transition.

Thanks for reading!