Blogging for Developers With Hexo

Using a Static Site Generators like Hexo gives a developer a very fast blogging workflow, using familiar tools and giving the ability to write offline. Content is written in markdown, keeping it portable between any blog generators and making it easy to version in Git. You can also use Git to deploy your site quickly, even over slow networks.

Static sites can be hosted anywhere and are fast to serve and easy to cache. For example, Github Pages offers a very fast way to host your site.

Lets take a look at Hexo, my favourite static site generator.

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Hexo Theme - Creating Image Styles

Adding images to a blog post helps the audience undersand what the will get from reading the article and if it will be relevant for the. Images also aid the understanding of the topic you are covering, especially if you are explaining something technical or more complicated.

The default theme for hexo only provides a single image style, so here I will create several styles of image to help convey the topic and details of every post.

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Hexo Tips When Upgrading to 2.6.x Onwards

Hexo has a bit of a refactor from version 2.6 onwards to make it a bit more flexible with regard to the node modules it uses. So when you create a new Hexo project you have to add some module to that project before you can generate your site. This is an easy step as its managed by the Node package manager (npm).

There are more details about migration steps on the Hexo Github project.

Here are the essential details and options for upgrading to Hexo 2.6 onwards.

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Hexo Custom Theme - Using FontAwesome Icons

FontAwesome provides a lot of icons you can use in your website instead of including image logos of various sizes. There are icons for twitter, linkedin, Github and RSS feeds. Using these icons keeps your website fast on any device or network.

I’ll explain how I configured the standard Hexo Landscape theme to add icons in my blog website navigation bar, each icon linking to the developer related sites I use such as Github and Twitter.

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Migrating From Blogger.com to Hexo.io Static Site Generator

I found writing articles with Blogger.com had become slow and a little frustrating. So I decided to switch to Hexo.io as I can write articles anywhere I have a text editor (usually Emacs). Hexo also creates a responsive and fast static website, so when people want to read the articles (including myself when I have forgotten something) then they can do so quickly and across multiple devices. As its a static site, I can deploy it anywhere.

So how do I get all of that content I created out of Blogger and into Hexo. Luckily Hexo has a migration tool to make things easier

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