Voice of the ten-year-old webmaster: Why did I choose to migrate the Hexo website to Webify

Foreword

My blog site was built before 2010. I have used blog programs such as dlog, pjblog, zblog, and manually created and used pure static HTML pages. I started using WordPress in 2010. In recent years, I have felt that WordPress is too bloated and complicated, and my purpose is just to write something and leave some records for myself, so I migrated the site to a more concise hexo.

Set up the environment on the local computer and configure the hexo site. Every time you write an article in markdown format in NetEase Cloud Notes, then copy it to the corresponding directory of the local computer hexo, and manually generate a new website static page. Finally, manually upload it to the server space, which completes the update of the website.

Webify official website: https://webify.cloudbase.net/

My needs

Although Hexo is concise and fast, there are several problems that have been bothering me, even affecting my interest and desire to write.

First, must use the computer I installed and configured hexo to publish and generate a new static page , and then update to the server. Although I have also learned some methods, such as copying and installing the hexo configuration file to a different computer, or uploading it to github, and updating it through github, the problem of website update and article publication cannot be solved well after all.

The second question is actually an extension of the first question. Every time a new article is published, after the article is written, it needs to be copied to the hexo directory, manually generates a static page, and then uploaded to the website server , this process is too cumbersome. Of course, I have also learned about the solutions, such as using the hexo-admin plug-in, adding background management to hexo, deploying hexo to the server, and updating articles online through admin-hexo. However, these deviate from my original intention of using hexo-concise and fast. If you want to toss like this, why not use a more powerful blog program such as WordPress?

In the process of tossing, I saw a technical article on the official website of hexo, introducing how to deploy hexo to GitHub Pages, which is very in line with my needs. The only problem is that the deployment process requires the help of Travis CI, a third-party platform, which is simple Things have become complicated again. In the end, I even moved the idea of converting hexo to jekyll, because hexo and jekyll have basically the same structure and fully support the .md article format. More importantly, GitHub Pages natively supports jekyll, which requires almost no settings. Although Github has unstable access in many places in China, this problem can be solved after using CDN.

I started to migrate hexo to GitHub Pages and deploy using jekyll. But soon I found a big problem, GitHub Pages does not support the jekyll plug-in . That's right, functions such as page turning, search, etc. simply realized with the help of the jekyll plug-in are almost impossible to achieve in GitHub Pages, which is very hopeless. So everything stopped again.

Xi mention Webify

Then I saw the cloud-developed Webify product, which supports the deployment of any form of blogs and personal sites to Webify. So I got to know it and found that it was exactly what I needed, which just solved my above-mentioned needs.

Deploying hexo with Webify is very simple, just bind your own hexo website repository in GitHub in the Webify control panel, because Webify has preset the hexo framework, all configurations are default and automatic .

After deployment, the website can be accessed. You can your own domain name . By default, will enable CDN acceleration .

Modify the website in your own GitHub repository, or plan to write a log in markdown format, webify will automatically build and deploy, generate a new static page and publish it. This means that in the future, you only need to write articles in GitHub (this is the case for this blog post), and the website will be fully updated automatically, perfect, which is exactly what I have been demanding.

The picture below is a list of warehouse files on my hexo website in GitHub.

According to the official documentation, when webify is built, the platform will first install the project dependencies specified in package.json for your application (including the development environment dependent devDependencies). webify will automatically install for the various environments and plug-ins that I installed and depended on when I created hexo locally. Finally, the hexo site generated by webify is exactly the same as the one I run locally.

Other features of Webify

Webify default support CDN , so the building site after a successful deployment, it may take 2-5 minutes to see the effect (the official team will continue to optimize).
The frameworks currently supported by Webify are:

React/Vue/Angular/Next.js/Nuxt.js/Hexo/Gatsby.js/Vite/Docusaurus 2 etc.

Webify basically supports domestic mainstream code hosting platforms Github/Gitlab/Gitee and Tencent Cloud Coding.

Now, using webify to deploy applications can also receive a 300 yuan no-threshold voucher, which is enough for personal websites for two years. If you are interested, you can go to the official website to have a look.

Webify official website: https://webify.cloudbase.net/