I’ve been struggling to choose a handy tool for blogging about seven or eight years ago. Before the day I’ve tried building my own blog system using Django. It was great proudness and excitement to see the first “Hello World” post appeared in my browser, but soon I realized that was far from a ready-to-use product. The editor on the admin site was less functional than Sublime Text or VSCode, and sometimes buggy. The rendered content would mess up and out of my control from time to time. And most importantly, I had to pay for a VPS (or PaaS, still costly) to run the site. I was in high school at the time, and no much income for the bills. Too much trivia to care about just for a perfect writing experience. So I gave up.

It was then I read about the concept of static site generators. I love the idea that separates writing from post rendering and publishing. One will have enough freedom to pick the most suitable tool in either stage. No more need to endure the shitty web editors and I can embrace my favourite local ones. Also the renderer is highly customizable, plus lots of fabulous themes to choose from.

At this era you may recommend Hugo, but I chose Hexo then, partly because of the Node.js booming at that time. It was hardly said to be perfect initially, but as years passed I’ve made it much more handy, by developing plugins to meet my own requirements. I have bundled them in this repository hexo-enhanced. Some of them are short in source code, but greatly improve my experience during writing. I am going to open up a new series to share the story behind the plugin.

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