Migrating From Octopress To Hexo

 Posted on May 28, 2015      2 minutes      Mamadou Babaei

Well, I was living a happy life with Octopress 2.x despite the fact that I didn’t do much blogging in the past couple of years. Moreover, in my estimation Octopress still should be considered as one of the greatest blogging platforms among its peers and I really got nothing against it. But, I see a few shortcomings which made me looking for alternatives (and some of these still affects the 3.x version of Octopress):

  • Being very slow on page generation specially when I enable UTF-8 encoding for my other blog in Farsi. Even building and installing Ruby/GSL on my FreeBSD machine did not made any difference (I was not able to build it on windows since it relies on GCC). Sorry, I prefer FreeBSD over GNU/Linux.

  • There is no easy way of fully running it on FreeBSD without too much hassle. Since I’m a heavy and long time FreeBSD user this is not acceptable for me to use a GNU/Linux, Mac or Windows machine, just for the sake of writing a blog post. As an example, due to an issue with one of its Ruby dependencies which is not supporting FreeBSD officially, I was not able to run rake watch.

  • Lack of a promising WYSIWYG markdown editor as the one that Hexo have. Although it’s not working on Hexo 3.x, yet.

  • Very slow development pace. Just to name a few examples I have to mention that it’s been almost a month since the stable 3.x release of Octopress but still there’s no documentation available on its official home page. And of course a 3 year gap between 2.x and 3.x releases. Another one is, I’ve been waiting for 2.1 release of Octopress for ages and it never came.

There are so many good things about Hexo. But, above them all the easy Octopress migration with zero effort. It’s just a matter of moving all your post files from Octopress source/_posts directory to Hexo source/_posts directory. And hell yeah Hexo generator is blazingly fast.

Update (2016/01/11): Great news! I just noticed Jared Forsyth (@jaredforsyth) has released v1.x of hexo-admin a few months ago which works on 3.x branch of Hexo. I’m writing this update from hexo-admin panel using v1.1.1 of the plug-in which works flawlessly. Awesome work, Jared.

FLOSS  FOSS  Hexo  Octopress 

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