This is my first post of this blog, which I should have documented why and how I made the decision along the way back in May 2019 to quit my job and start my sabbtical on traveling South America and hopefully Africa. Now it’s July 15, 2019, I was distracted by many other tasks, and interests since the day of my big decision. The post actually documented why and how I created this blog. It is a boring technical blog, I enjoyed it very much. Anyway, I am not good at writing prose in English nor in Chinese anyway. So take it or leave it!

Why Hexo?

Besides documenting my voyager, the blog is a side project to keep myself entertained. I have basic knowledge in Javascript, HTML, and CSS and that’s all I know about website development.

The goal here was to hopefully create something interesting and learn some new languages…(OK, family said I should spend more time learning the real useful language SPANISH. So far I am still counting uno, dos, tres…progress is really sloooooooooow here)

Anyway, below is my requirements when I chose the blog generator:

highly customizable or allow me to write some scripting. This is the entertainment! Therefore, Facebook and WeChat are OUT!
FREE…yes at least at this very initial stage. Remember, I have just quitted my job…
Pretty according to my personal taste! My initial test readers, I know you don’t like this current black and white theme.

So I googled couple of hours and chose Hexo, again to my personal taste only not after lots of technical review. At that time, I didn’t even know what is node.js, static site generator, etc. Who cares? Its name sounds nice and the sample themes are pretty.

To complete my simple review, it seems that the popular static site generators are:

Hexo Blog Creation & Host

So far, I am on my day 6 of Hexo. My current structure is Hexo + Github Hosting. There are lots of instructions from the website and if you can read Chinese, that’s even better. One of cons of Hexo is the majority of the community is non-English speakers, mainly Chinese. But this is not an issue to me.

Creating the initial Hexo blog is relatively easy, should be up within couple of hours. Here is a good post for your reference:

https://ericdouglas.github.io/2016/08/21/how-to-create-a-blog-with-hexo/

For the theme, I selected next. This is one of the most popular theme with fairly good selection of plugins & online resources. Not perfect to my taste, but good enough for me to start.

As for the markdown editor, I use Typora. No special reasons, simply for its appearance!

My Hexo Blog Dev Log

Milestones & Features as of July 15, 2019:

Initial Deployment Up & Running: July 9, 2019
Theme selection & basic customization: July 11, 2019
Embedded R script markdown, R shinny app, & leaflet interactive maps: July 13, 2019

Lan: this I struggled two nights! Solution is actually simple but after many trial-and-error. I gave up all the plugins, and ended up with embedding HTML in markdown…here is how I did it.
Initial blog soft launch & presentation to my family: July 14, 2019

Lan: I thought I have made substantial breakthrough on July 13, 2019. I have R script with plots, interactive shiny apps, and leaflet map up and running, though all three were made with very basic functions. It turned out that NONE of the readers were interested…They asked for colorful template, the thrumb up button, the comments blocks for real interactions, more pictures (hey, I have not even started my voyager yet!), music player?! \ (╯-╰) /
First post: July 15, 2019

Features to be developed before my departure date August 20, 2019:

Special requirement: the following should be available for both US & China mainland. Surprisingly, it’s not an simple task…

Image Repository: not push to Github due to its size limitation
Music Player
Comment Plug-in
Google Analytic Plug-in
Sitemap
RSS
Bilingual Page: this is not a trivial task. Tried several approaches, but none of them is perfect so far
Theme customization: low priority