§Save, and Save Often

Now that I’ve been using Hexo for about nine months I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. Since I don’t post often it’s pretty easy to manage the content without needing something heavier (or DB-backed) to keep track of everything.

Luckily I’m also running this on GitLab and have been committing and pushing updates regularly. Everything had been running smoothly… up until March 1st. I thought I might be a little out-of-date with some of the packages I’m using in npm so I ran npm update in my site directory, committed the changes, and pushed up to my repo.

Build failed.

Sonofa. Check the logs and see this right at the end:

$ hexo deploy
ERROR Local hexo not found in   /builds/********/********  
ERROR Try running: 'npm install hexo --save'  
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

Ok, easy enough (or so I thought). Just roll back one commit and I should be set. Didn’t work, more because of my lack of git and npm knowledge than anything else. I ended up fixing it by merging an older version into the master, pulling changes, and pushing back up to the repo. This happened over the course of a few hours, working on it when I had a few minutes at a time. The quick(ish) version was something like this:

git pull
git checkout -b {branch}
{edits, install correct version}
git checkout master
git fetch
git merge {branch}
{resolve a couple of conflicts}
git pull
git push

At least I’ll remember to make a new branch before updating next time - I also have the Hexo version pinned in my CI configuration (to make sure it works with GitLab pages). This was a good learning experience, and hopefully something I won’t have to do again… for this project anyway.

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§…or, architecting the site before I know better

I like Hexo so far. It’s easy to work with, I’m learning a lot along the way, and almost have it set up on all of my systems (GitLab makes it easy).

Next I need to find some best practice info on Hexo, related to folder structure. It’s great that I can do whatever I want; it’s tough that I can do whatever I want.

§The What

A lot of what I’m doing will fall under the “blog” but I have other content that I want to post. Lists of Android Apps, Windows Apps, Linux apps, Podcasts, and more - across several categories for each area. There’s also writing that I’ve done and the Spark File (ok, files) I have.

Maybe the more generalized version of the breakdown is: braindump into the post entries, more organized stuff into pages. I’ll probably change my mind about a dozen times before I get much further…

§To Do

• Theme
• Layout
• Plugins
• Write, write, write

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