Why Hexo?
At first I used Jekyll 3.8.5 and built a blog on GitHub. There are a lot of equations in my post, so I also used Jekyll-Katex 0.3.0, a Jekyll plugin for easy server-side math rendering via KaTeX. Everything works fine on my local machine. But when I pushed it to GitHub, I got this: “Your site is having problems building: The tag Katexmm on line 11 in _posts/2019-01-22-ECDSA-and-Bitcoin-I.md is not a recognized Liquid tag.”
I tried Netlify and Cloudcannon, as suggested by ashmaroli on StackOverflow, and failed again. Did I Choose the Right Static Generator? I asked myself. So I decided to try Hexo.
1. Hexo works fine with KaTeX
First, set up Hexo environment, choose a theme, embed KaTeX and other plugins and test it on my local server. Migrate markdown posts from Jekyll to Hexo is easy. What you need to do is just delete some liquid tags or something like that. If everything goes well, you may see your pretty equations within one hour.
2. Hexo is faster
With the same markdown posts, jekyll serve costed me about 60 seconds, While hexo server
is less than 3 seconds. The speed of Hexo is around ! Furthermore, each time you save changes in my text editor, i.e. Atom, you don’t need to hexo server again. Refresh you browser and you’ll see the changes updated.
3. Fancy theme and plugins
Theme “Next” is amazing. There are lot’s of plugins ready to employ. It’s handy and powerful.