Static site gens the 2nd: Hexo and Sandra.Snow

In my recent blog post I wrote about my experiences so far with static site gens in general. I said I was looking into Hexo before I go on with my plan B and this is what I did.

Hexo is very capable. If you really just want to a blog, then this is the way to go (imho). The main problem with Hexo is that it is a one-man-show from China and that this guy is currently in the middle of the process to release Hexo 3.0. Which is not a bad thing, but for one several plugins have not yet been updated, which makes it very hard to get things running. Then again, some plugins like the sitemap plugin that should generate a sitemap.xml do not have access to all entries for the tags and the categories. That said, I could probably write my own, but while the API is documented somehow I don’t got around configuring my WebStorm IDE correctly so that it indeed provides me with code completion on the Hexo API, which makes everything very tedious.

That said, under all static site generators Hexo is by far the most powerful one, and definitely worth a look at, as it is plain JavaScript, runs on Node and is very unproblematic to install both on Windows and on OS X.

Before I went on with my plan B I also tried a quick look at Sandra.Snow. Sandra.Snow is a .NET based static site gen. I looked at it and its source and also talked to its creator on JabbR. I did not really dig deeper into it. Again the problem was that it is totally intended to be a blog platform. Doing some more sophisticated website stuff with it is not really supported and seems very hard to do.

So, from my trip to the world of static site gens I am back with a finding. If you want a simple blog, concentrate on your articles, are fine with some predefined template you don’t want to make a lot of changes to and don’t want to do more sophisticated stuff like creating menus for all of your categories and tags on the start page, which involves knowing all posts metadata while generating the main page, it seems almost all static site gens are capable of delivering what you need. As soon as you want to do more fancy stuff, some fall apart sooner, some later.

If I wanted to move my personal blog (this one) away from Wordpress to a static page, it probably would be Hexo. But for now, I’m firing up my Visual Studio on my PC and Xamarin Studio on my Mac and build my website with ASP.NET MVC. That at least also allows me to implement a search functionality into the page.

Update: Fixed some of my mistakes. Thanks to Andreas H. for proofreading. :)