From Ghost to Hexo

announcementblog
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After a few months of hosting my blog at DigitalOcean, I decided to ditch Ghost.
Instead, I’m moving my blog to Hexo, hosted by GitHub Pages.

TL;DR -

  • Ghost doesn’t offer any server features, but runs one.
  • Ghost wasn’t fast enough.
  • Unnecessary Server costs.
  • To much Maintenance.

Why Ghost?

I didn’t like WordPress and found Ghost a good alternative.
A full explanation can be found at - From WordPress.com to Ghost on DigitalOcean.

Why Move (again)?

Server runtime with no server features

Ghost doesn’t offer any dynamic features, and honestly - I don’t really need any.
My entire blog is static, except for comments which are provided by Disqus.

That means I needed to setup a server for a (de-facto) static website.

Speed

My blog wasn’t snappy enough. There are a number of “blame” factors:

  • Ghost isn’t fast enough (I never checked that)
  • The droplet I was paying for didn’t supply enough resources for Ghost

I decided to redirect my users to AMP to gain extra speed. I set up rules on nginx to only redirect mobile users to AMP, which I didn’t like for serveral reasons:

  1. AMP removed disqus and mathjax (which made some posts unreadable from mobile)
  2. It gives my users two distinct websites, with a completely different design.

Plus, Everything Alex Kras wrote about the subject - I decided to disable AMP on my site .

Maintenance

I found myself doing a lot of work to make sure my blog is working like I except it too, and that I have everything backed up.

Price

I felt fine with paying 10$ a month for a droplet, but once I had to pay more to gain performance I went back to the drawing board.

Hexo?

There are a ton of static page generators out there, but I like Hexo the most -

  • Hexo is fast
  • Hexo is simple
  • Hexo is powerful
    • It’s easy hack
    • It’s pluggable, with a huge plugin ecosystem
    • It has great tooling

All you need to do in order to get up and running is to type the following:

$ npm install hexo-cli -g
$ hexo init blog
$ cd blog
$ npm install
$ hexo server

Plus, Elad Zelingher, which is a good friend of mine and a rockstar, migrated his blog to Hexo.

Gains

Once I move to Hexo I’ll gain -

  • Better performance
  • Zero maintenance - everything is hosted on GitHub
  • Free hosting - The site served using GitHub Pages
  • Global distribution via GitHub and Cloudflare
  • IMO, a better editing experience - I can finally edit with vim!

Migration Process

Hexo provides tooling for migration from other platform like: WordPress, Joomla, Jekyll, etc’.

Unfortunately, there are no “official” tools to migrate from Ghost. Fortunately, a solution is always a google search away: hexo-migrator-ghost.

The process was much easier than last time, but I still had to do some work:

  1. Fix Bugs: tags weren’t properly migrated & some posts wouldn’t pass migration, so I had to fix those in the migrator.
  2. Custom Migration: I used prism.js to highlight code blocks in Ghost. Hexo uses highlight.js instead. I had to take care of syntax changes.
  3. Manual Work: fixing tags, adding categories, etc’

Once I was done, and everything worked locally, I deployed the blog, then followed Cloudflare’s Secure and fast GitHub Pages with CloudFlare.