New Website

Meet the new Website, same as the old website.

I switched to blogger a while back. It was nice having free hosting. But I have to say I've remained underwhelmed with the features there. Posting was nice, but then the app was removed so I had to go to the website to post, or find a third party app to post. Theming was nice, but I'm a programmer and I sometimes want to add something funky to the site.

Back to roll your own site. Well, almost.

• First get your data out of blogger. It's great that google makes this easy to do. You may have to write some code to get the images and convert the blog posts to a format that can be used somewhere else. I think Markdown makes the most sense.
• Pick a hosting service. I decided to use Linode. I should be fine with the basic plan $5 a month.
• Pick a blog engine. I'm going with Hexo it's a simple node based engine that generates a static site. This will reduce processor costs.
• Pick a theme - I started with the default Hexo theme.
• My domain is still being managed by hover.

How do I update the blog

• New posts are created normally in Drafts on my iPad or phone. Since their written in Markdown I can create them any where I want to.
• I have created a few actions in drafts to help with post creation.
• I add tags to the blog entry so that it is easy to find within the site.
• Once the post is ready I save it to a shared drive so I can generate the updated site with Hexo.
• I then deploy the site to linode. For now I'm doing this manually - but this can all be automated.