From Jekyll to Hexo

Two years ago, I dove into the wonderful world of static blog generators when I
left my TechNet blog behind and started using Jekyll
to generate an Azure web site. With my newfound freedom from complex content
management systems, I raved about Jekyll in a blog post. But once the honeymoon
was over, some cracks started to appear in the relationship.

Jekyll does not officially support Windows, so you have to jump through some
hoops to get it up and running. This didn’t seem so bad at first, but I’m one
of those people who is constantly tinkering with my PC, buying new hardware,
and upgrading things, so I end up doing a clean install of my OS several times
a year.

Back in the day, a clean install of Windows might sound daunting, but these days,
it only takes minutes. The Windows install itself is pretty fast, and I
have several Boxstarter scripts that use
Chocolatey to install all the software I use. This
means getting back up and running is fairly painless - except for Jekyll.

It seemed like every time I got a clean install, that fresh new clean OS feeling
was soon soured by errors from Jekyll. The hoops I had to jump through to get it
up and running would change slightly each time due to changes in
Ruby or problems
with gems. For a while, I dealt with this issue by blogging from one of my Ubuntu
VMs.

Finally, I started shopping around for something not based on Jekyll and preferably
with no Ruby dependency at all. There are a lot of options,
but for now, I’ve settled on Hexo.

Hexo is powered by Node.js, and since I’m a big fan of
JavaScript and a big fan of npm, this seems like a natural fit. Maybe this will
be enough motivation to continue the series I left off with, or at least to write
a new technical post of some kind.