Hello World 👋
After sitting on this for a long time and wanting to blog / write down my thoughts, I’ve finally got my act together and started this. There were so many times I was asked some very good questions which I am sure not just the person asking me but a lot more would have been interested in knowing the answer/solution/thoughts around the matter. This is a way to write about that and help the wider community who are searching for similar solutions.
I regularly answer in Stack Overflow and in some cases I wrote a question and answered it myself just incase some one was looking for something similar, that wasn’t really the ideal platform to do that. There have been so many times that going through and reading other people’s blogs have helped me and unlocked me in problems that I was stuck with; this is a in a way trying to give back to the community and helping people that are on the look out for a solution for a similar problem.
How to power the blog
There were so many choices out there when it came to what frameworks and libraries to use to build the blog and what to use to host the blog.
My requirements when it came to building were simple
- Easy to author posts
- Easy to build
- Easy to maintain
- Most customizations (eg: search, ads, tags, categories etc) should come out of the box
My requirements when it came to hosting were even simpler
- Has to be free
- Has to be able to handle ‘some’ level of load
- Easy to CI/CD
Main choices here boiled down to:
All the options were good, I really liked Hugo, it was so easy to create a site. But all of them were geared towards creating a CMS / generic site. I was looking for something that had all the things needed for a blog out of the box with out having to grab lots of plugins or write something custom.
Jekyll and GitHub pages were really good, it nailed most of the things, but I didn’t really want to go down the road of learning Jekyll just to host a blog. This left one and Hexo fit my requirements beautifully. It was a dedicated Javascript framework that has all the things I was looking for out of the box and it had 360+ themes available all community built and free.
One thing I loved about Hexo is the fact its builds the source to a static site and you can use GitHub to host the static site and use GitHub Actions to build the static site from source.
This is what I went with in the end, Hexo to build the blog. I write everything in markdown files and Hexo builds it out into a nice static site and I host it using GitHub pages as a public repo
There are some limits of hosting with GitHub Pages, the main one is the 100GB of bandwidth as a soft limit. Since this is just a static site 100GB should be plenty but if and when it comes to that I will look at putting a CDN in front.
Final Result
- Hexo to build the blog into a static site
- Icarus theme
- GitHub Pages to host the site
- Bulma to help enrich the markdown files with styling
References
As always a big thank you to Unsplash for providing a huge range of images for free
- Cover image has been taken from https://unsplash.com/photos/3SIXZisims4
Hello World 👋
