Moved to vitepress

Holy crap. It was way back in 2017 that I moved my blog from Jekyll to Hexo. I'd recently moved from mostly Ruby development to mostly Node.js development, so hacking on a new static site generator written in ECMAscript seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

Hexo has some things I really don't like about it. But, for some reason, I am possessed by something akin to brand loyalty, so I stuck with Hexo for years. Now that it's been nearly ten, I think that was just way too many. I mean, it doesn't even have page reloading on source save. I hate to write it, but having to manually refresh pages during development just felt like way too much.

I'm a really big fan of Jupyter Book and its MyST Document Engine, by far the best Markdown-based engine for publishing. I would happily use that, but I just didn't want to have to figure out a migration path from Hexo to JB with the existing 14 years of posts.

Eventually, I found vitepress. It's got lots of good stuff. I dig that. I'm even using the default theme with a couple of custom Vue components to do things I would like it to do, like automatically put those hero pictures at the top of the blog posts.

I liked it so much that I migrated the Almost Alive Studio Web site to Vitepress, too, with a completely custom theme based on a Vue library that provides Bulma components called Buefy.

If you're a developer looking for a new static site generator and you're okay with ECMAscript and Vue, have a look at Vitepress. It's pretty darn okay.