Commemoration
The evening of January 24, 2023 — three days ago.
I finally made up my mind to switch the blog from the old theme hexo-theme-matery to the current hexo-theme-fluid.
Though, due to all kinds of strange issues, I dragged it out over two or three days before finishing, at least resolving most of the problems.
The old theme had few features when I was using it, so I added a lot of features and modified many files on my own branch. When it came time to update, the merge produced a ton of problems and version control completely blew up. Plus, with no comments, there was a lot I didn’t even know what it was..
Mostly because when I was adding code earlier, I never thought about future updates, so I added code and edited or deleted files at will. The git history was a total mess, and I didn’t even know what I had done..
Thoughts and notes
The biggest problem when switching themes was a feature newly introduced in recent hexo versions: overriding theme settings, i.e. _config.<theme.name>.yml.
I had previously configured it following the fluid docs override configuration, but after a day of tinkering it still wouldn’t take effect. I didn’t want to modify the _config directly under the theme, so I couldn’t figure it out. Then, a day later, I had the sudden idea to rename _config.fluid.yml to _config.hexo-theme-fluid.yml — and it worked…
I have to say, after switching themes the loading speed is much faster, and the Lighthouse score is much higher too. The effect is really significant, and it looks about the same as before. The old theme focused too much on flashy features, loading a lot of js and css, which made loading quite slow. Now fluid strikes a good balance between visuals and loading speed.