Last weekend, I migrated my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll.
Wordpress is a solid blog platform and has served me well for the past 7 years, but at this point I simply don’t need anything that sophisticated. The frequent security exploits have also become a bit of a liability, and in fact my blog was already hacked in the past. To be fair, the Wordpress development team tends to react quickly with security updates, but I simply don’t have the diligence to keep my Wordpress installation up to date all the time. I’ve also never been a fan of the Wordpress web interface for writing posts, and in fact I have switched to Markdown and MarsEdit several years ago.
Jekyll simply takes this another step further (or backwards, depending on how you want to look at it), by eschewing server-side functionality altogether. Instead, content lives in simple markdown text files and is rendered into static HTML files that can then be served up by a regular webserver like Apache or Nginx, or even hosted on Amazon S3. It’s fairly basic, but allows me to serve posts, feeds, and other pages. Comments are elegantly handled by using third party services such as Disqus (as in my case) or the Facebook Comments plugin. Jekyll is extensible via its plugin architecture. Last not least, it is written in Ruby, which gives me the option to fork it and completely adapt it to my needs if necessary.
I’ll leave it at that. There are already plenty of posts out there about using Jekyll in general, or migrating to Jekyll from Wordpress or other blog platforms.
With any luck, this change will have the nice side effect of motivating me to post more frequently on my blog again, which has been dormant for the past year or so.