I have just finished the migration of this blog from Blogger to the static site generator Hexo. The new layout finally supports mobile devices by a responsive design.

Why the move away from Blogger? I used Blogger with the old theme for 5 years and I was quite satisfied with the features and site performance. All for free.
But with the years the pain was growing, I spent too much time fixing the layout and the integration of source code examples was a hell. Therefore I was looking for a new blogging system which has additionally a better layout for mobile visitors.

I had a quick look at some hosted solutions like good old Wordpress, but quickly found that static web site generators are perfect for me. After playing with the popular ruby based static blog generator Octopress, I found Hexo. Hexo is a simple node.js-based static blogging framework, which is easy to learn and extend. Currently I host the generated static files on Google Cloud Storage.

The new system offers the following features:

• Very good performance and easy to scale. Only a simple web server is necessary to host the static files.
• Responsive design!
• Easy editing in your favorite text editor (VIM!) with markdown syntax.
• Fast integrated syntax highlighting for source code examples.
• Version control can be done completely with Git.
• No hosting lock-in, you can easily move the static files to another web hoster.

Of course I have some further improvements on my todo list, like:

• Better social media integration
• Increase caching of the served files
• Commenting: Currently disqus is used, but I am still unsure if comments are really necessary on a blog