The time has finally come to ditch Wordpress for something much lighter, markdown-based and easy to work with.

After much search and procrastination, I settled on Hexo.js, which, to my delight turned out to be a fantastic little site-generator.

Actually, one of the main reasons I wanted to ditch Wordpress for a while now, is the fact that its commenting system is absolute crap. Even when disabled, I got junk mail from robots trying to submit comments to my posts (I used Disqus for comments), and digging around a little, I found that I have to dive deep into WP’s code to completely disable comments on the blog. Bah!

My top reasons for choosing Hexo are:

1. Well documented
2. Customisation and theming, including a long list of free themes to choose from (I ended up going for the moretwo theme)
3. Well thought-out deployment support with Github pages, Heroku and RSync out of the box
4. Wordpress Importer plugin which saved my a lot of headaches pulling my content from the old blog

In case you’re curious, I opted for hosting my site on Amazon S3, as it’s running under the top-level domain name zohararad.com, which means Github pages setup will be a bit of a pain, and I saw no need to run a Heroku dyno for a static site.

I used Chitrang Shah’s wonderful instructions on how to deploy Hexo to S3 with Grunt, which worked much better than the published hexo-deployer-s3. The latter requires saving AWS credentials in the main config (a bit no-no if you want to use source control), and Chitrang Shah’s Grunt setup covered a few other nice-to-haves that the plugin doesn’t.

To finish things off, I downloaded MacDown (which I’m using to write this post), which turns out to be a great little Markdown editor for Mac.