During the New Year holiday, I spent some time deploying my personal English blog site. It uses the same services and tech as my Chinese blog; the only difference is the content. So this is also a review of the vendor services used in my blog deployment, summarized here.
Hexojs — static blog framework
Using Hexo: posts are written in Markdown and compiled to static HTML, so it’s fast to serve. Downsides: as content grows, build times slow. With 300+ Chinese posts, a full build took ~8 minutes.
This remains unresolved for now.
theme-next
I use theme-next. I customize parts, but keep custom templates/CSS separate to ease framework/theme upgrades.
Vultr
I deployed static pages on Vultr Japan, $6/mo — decent speed from mainland China.
Now migrated to Tencent Cloud.
GitHub
Source code is hosted on GitHub; CD uses GitHub Actions. It’s stable and free.
Telegram Bot
I added notifications for deployments; Telegram is ideal. Using appleboy/telegram-action.
Notes
- The token is obtained via
@BotFather. The token format is1234567890:ABCDEFGHIJKLMN. - The URL to get the chatId using the token is
https://api.telegram.org/bot1234567890:ABCDEFGHIJKLMN/getUpdates. If the result says OK but theresultarray is empty, send a message to the bot and try again.
Let’s Encrypt
Most sites are on SSL now; I use Let’s Encrypt because it’s free and Certbot automates issuance/renewal.
Since I host both Chinese/English sites and an image host, I applied for a wildcard cert.
GitTalk
Comment system based on GitHub Issues — convenient.
Algolia
Search: fast, good UX, and free tier.
Google AdSense
Hosting isn’t free; AdSense may offset costs. Ads do slow page loads, admittedly.
Google Search Console
Webmaster tools:
- SEO for Google: submit sitemaps for crawling
- Monitor site traffic
Final Thoughts
That’s the stack of third‑party services behind my blog. Even a small blog ties together quite a lot of tech.
