Wordpress to Jekyll

I movedthis website from WordPress to Jekyll. Jekyll is a Ruby static-site generator which turns your text files into related HTML files. So far, I love it. Since all the files that Jekyll generates are just HTML files, I don’t have to worry about a database or any sort of maintenance issues. Even better, I can now host this blog on Github, or Amazon S3, for free.

Theatrical Poster from the Library of Congress, Image Library

Anyone who has used WordPress, or any other CMS platform, for a personal site for a while understands that it requires frequent maintenance. While WordPress is great at many tasks, the frequent updates and security issues get annoying after a while. On top of that, you can’t simply edit files in your text editor. Recently I stumbled into Jekyll which is the Ruby static site generator.

Setup

One of my main concerns while using WordPress was backing up data. Since Jekyll simply works with text files, this means that I can now keep these files anywhere I like. So I keep all the files for this website in a Dropbox folder so that all changes automagically get synced across different computers – this is awesome! When working with Jekyll you create and edit simple text files and, based on your templates, Jekyll processes them and turns them into interconnected html files. All of the generated files are kept in a folder which can be deployed onto Github or your own private server.

Deploying

Editing and deploying the changes to this blog are probably my favorite reasons for switching to Jekyll. Once I have edited the text files that I need, I add these changes to git and push to the git remote server.

#Edit the files and have Jekyll update the deployment folder

jekyll build
cd _site
git add .
git commit
git push #That's it!

While WordPress and similar platforms are great for most users, those that prefer the peace of mind of working with simple text files should check out Jekyll.