I was looking for a way to add commenting functionality to the blog. The obvious candidate was Disqus but I did not choose it for 2 reasons: It’s too heavy(at around 200KB) It contains ads The weight itself would kill my quest for page speed instantly.So I set up to find a way to provide commenting ability on the blog. I knew this would probably lead me to a self-hosted solution but that did not scare me. Requirements were quite simple: ...

I’ve been using Go as my main programming language at work for the last 6 months. Here’s why I absolutely adore the language. It’s simple Go is remarkably simple. It’s an object oriented programming language but instead of the more typical classes you find in C# or Java it only has structs. Structs cannot inherit, meaning you can’t end up in inheritance hell. I won’t go into detail why inheritance is bad, but if you want an explanation Inheritance is Inherently Evil is a good read on that. All you want to achieve with inheritance can instead be done through composition and the use of interfaces. It also gets rid of generics. This means that the code you read will be clear and simple. It might be more verbose than many other languages but you also carry more control. ...

An explanation As mentioned in my previous post, I really wanted to optimize my hexo blog for speed. I’ve started a new project and decided hexo would be a good fit for it. Since I’ve grown used to hexo, it will make development faster. Albeit it’s not a blog I’m working on, but a webpage for a local blacksmith. That will involve quite a few images and just a few text entries/pages. Being able to deploy to S3 is also a benefit - no need to manage anything - and since the webpage is going to be pretty static I’m thinking hexo is a good way to go. The problem though, is that most of the themes that hexo has are quite slow out of the box. For this walkthrough, I’ll be doing a demo repo with a standard hexo init followed by a clone of the theme edinburgh. I have a repo setup with all the steps tagged, so you should be able to see the exact changes I’m making. I’ll include step links just after the heading for each section if you’re interested in following along. Let’s get going then. ...

So me and my girlfriend have been playing with the idea of starting a blog for quite some time now. Having a day off I’ve decided to put it to good use and start creating one. Being a developer I’ve had a few concerns when it came to choosing a blog framework: I’m a control freak so I’d prefer hosting it myself. Blogging platforms are out of the question. I like markdown - the blog must support it. It must be lightweight. It must be easily deployable to s3 static website hosting. I should not need to use anything else than s3 for hosting. Just a text editor and a CLI for a good blogging experience. After a bit of research and a tip from a friend I’ve landed on Hexo.io. It seems to tick all of my boxes. Plugin support seems to be excellent as well. Being based on node it means I’ll mostly be able to find anything my heart might desire. If not - I can code it myself. ...