New Blog Platform Based on Markdown and Git

If you've followed this blog for a while you'll notice that I had a significant drop in articles over the past year. So much so that I went from 35 posts in 2015 to just 4 posts in 2016. They're various reasons for the reduction of posts which all came down to time, more specifically the lack of it.

I realized that I had the time to write the content for posts but I didn't have the time to deal with all the formatting that was required on the blogger.com platform (which used to host talkapex.com). It's a great platform when writing basic text articles however when adding code samples it becomes an absolute pain to manage code formatting, especially editing an existing post.

Since working on many open source projects I've discovered Markdown which is an easy-to-write plain text format that has special syntax for developers. If you've never used it I highly recommend that you look into it as it'll change how you write technical documentation.

Over the weekend I moved this blog from the Blogger platform to Hexo and its now hosted on Github Pages. This allows me to quickly write my blog posts in Markdown, manage the entire blog as a git repository on Github, and use Github Pages to host the site. If I find some time I'll try to write about the migration process.

A few notes on the new talkapex.com:

  • Older posts may not be formatted correctly. I'm working towards cleaning them as time permits
  • Comments were not retained and the site is using a new comment platform: Disqus
  • Tags have all been cleaned up
  • All the old URLs should work
  • If you need to reference a comment or view the old site you can do so here.

If you do find something out of place or a broken link let me know or leave a comment on the article.

Going forward I'm hoping to write a lot of new posts quickly with this platform and time will tell if this migration solved the goal of allowing me to write more in 2017.

Special thanks to Adrian Png for introducing me to Hexo