Migrate Hexo blog to Jekyll

Motivation

The first and main reason is very simple: I would like to pick up my personal website. I feel like that many of my problems, both in work and life, actually result from my laziness to put them into my own words. Writing for myself is not enough for striving to express myself as best as I can. However, writing in some SNS brings me kind of humiliation as I grow up as a weak human.¹ This place, a public space with only few to none noticing, is still the best playground. Meanwhile, some posts and information are obsolete, thus updates or archiving would be favorable for my own and public (if any) interest.

Secondly, I cannot build my Hexo website on my old macOS laptop after I update some brew taps (hexo itself, probably). The only one to blame is myself, being unable to write more frequently to adapt any breaking changes as soon as possible.

Thirdly, landing on Qijing’s website triggers my interest in the Chirpy theme with Jekyll. The theme is tidy but meanwhile very functional. The Jekyll static site generator, although “older” than Hexo and Hugo, is used by many and still actively developed by its community.

Theme

As implied above, I use the Chirpy theme. Instead of using the kickstart repository, I forked it by commit 1719d81. Update to the upstream can still be applied here by differing and patching, but I would refrain from this unless necessary.

Modification

Below is a list of modifications I made to the forked upstream commit, other than the _config.yml configuration file

• Hide tags and categories pages by adding variable sidebar_tabs to _config.yml, and add filter in _includes/sidebar.html (see comment)
• Comment out post preview part in _layouts/home.html for a cleaner home page (maybe introduce support of excerpt later)
• Justify post text by modifying _sass/addon/commons.scss according to the comment from Chirpy’s author
• Add an ORCID social link in _includes/sidebar.html and switch it on in _data/contact.yml
• Modify foreground color of inline code in light mode by changing --highlighter-rouge-color in _sass/colors/light-syntax.scss
• Enable equation numbering by modifying _includes/js-selector.html

Tool

A helper script for publishing/drafting posts postu is created under directory tools, as a simple alternative to jekyll-compose.

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1. or rather, age++ ↩︎