From the last few months, I have decided to write some blog posts (using markdown) so to document some of the stuff that I've been working on. Previously I have placed it in this github repository, hoping that one day I would be able to transfer those blog posts into a permenant website.

I have been pretty lazy to try to set up a web, writing the HTML pages and the theme that comes with it, especially since I haven't really worked a lot with aesthetics of a website. And besides, it is the 21st century, who codes in raw HTML anymore? So I decided that probably I would write in markdown, and find some way to use static webpage generators to do the HTML work for me.

Initially, I was considering using Github pages with Jekyll, but it seems pretty riddled with a lot of issues installing and stuff. Also, I wasn't able to find a decent theme with Github pages.

Furthermore, with the recent Microsoft acquisition of Github, I decided to host this website on Gitlab (since I haven't really done anything on Github yet.) Then I found this cool alternative static webpage generator called hexo (or initially, I found a cool theme based on top of hexo called hueman which this website is based off of). So far, I think it is pretty neat theme, and relatively easy to use.

There were a few issues I had with this initially, maybe if someone saw this and needed to figure out how to set this up, this might help:

• Hexo installation issues: This is more of my own issue, particularly with Node.js and how it is packaged in Ubuntu. Apparently, Ubuntu only distributes Node.js at the version v4.2.6. Sighs... why? The latest stable version of Node.js is v10.4.1!! Okay, well anyways, the installer for hexo complained about some weird errors because Node.js is out of date. Okay, then, how do I install the latest version of Node.js? I could go to their website, but it's such a hassle going there and then downloading it and then building from source/ running an installer. In the end I used this answer (install a helper package called n that installs a version of Node.js) to solve my issues.

• Language issues: Hueman had quite a few different languages to use for internationalization. However, by default, when using hexo init to initialize the website, it did not set the language by default. Furthermore, hueman didn't seem to have a "default" language to choose from. So hexo decided to choose the first language in alphabetical order: Catalonia. That really bothered me when I can't read any words on the blog when testing it. :(

• Config.yml: Apparently, I did not read the installation instructions all the way for installing the hueman theme. So I cloned the theme, then directly went to run hexo. When I tried to load a page, hexo kept on spitting out some errors (because certain configurations were undefined). Within the hueman repository, I found a config file with the name _config.yml.example, and found that they defined some of the configurations needed by Hueman. So I copied that file and overriden my root _config.yml file (I made a backup of the old one just in case). Apparently, I overlooked this step:

  3. Rename _config.yml.example in the theme folder to _config.yml.

  In the end, I just copied the contents of _config.yml.example into my _config.yml file.

• categories vs tags: When writing blog posts, you have a place on top of each post to place some metadata (date, title, etc...). Apparently with hexo, they support both the categories and tags fields. What's the difference? Well, the biggest difference is how hexo interprets these: categories are like "directories" you can organize your posts in. You can use multiple categories to represent subdirectoriess within a directory. On the other hand tags are like "keywords" that you annotate within each post. It does not have a hierarchy structure like categories. Most of my posts will be under the "Blogs" category, but I might add multiple tags to help specify what my blog post is about.

Okay well that's my journey to setting up a website. Hopefully, now that it's set up, I'll be able to more easily maintain it, (it has been one of those things I wanted to get set for so long, but never found the time to do it...)