michael@slashetc:~$

Wordpress to Jekyll Migration Success!!

Hello Markdown World!!

Good bye Wordpress (and good riddens), hello Jekyll!! I’ve finally jumped off the Wordpress bandwagon, leaving all it’s complexities and constant vulrnabilities behind in favor of Jekyll. This has allowed me to publish my website іn a static manner without constantly updating my site to combat the never ending flow of exploits, vulrnabilities, etc. that come with Wordpress.

The change however does not come without cost. There are a few luxuries Wordpress affords, one thing is it has wonderfull tools to manage and format your posts, with a WYSIWYG style editor in a browser. This method is nice for someone who just want’s to get content up on a site (and in 2014 when I purchased my domain that was exactly what I was looking to do.) Another it theme management, themes in Jekyll, don’t exactly play nice when you’re first starting out. Wordpress themes mostly just work, at least in way that it’s simply a few button clicks to make it look the way you want it. In Jekyll it took me longer to find a theme that I liked and didn’t break the site than it did to convert my Wordpress posts over.

However, where Jekyll has more manual tasks in comparison to Wordpress - they can be scripted. The best part of Jekyll I’ve found is one you have it all setup - you can manage it completely from the terminal. Not something you can say about Wordpress. This post I typed in Markdown, completely from a terminal running vim on my laptop. When it’s ready, it’s simply commited to my GitLab instance and CI tasks are automatticly kicked off to build the site and push the content off to either a Dev VM, or out to production (where you’re reading this now.) One of the biggest plusses however, when developing the site/adding posts/etc. Jekyll supports building and hosting the site locally, so you can see your changes locally - in real time - without deploying to dev or prod. Simply run bundle exec jekyll serve in the root of the repo and point your browser at http://localhost:4000. The site will automatticly be rebuilt on file changes.

Writing in markdown was another hurdle, a small one but it existed. While re-building this site and working with it more closely than a quick README.md or wiki page I found it extremely easy to pick up and write in. Cheatsheets are also nice to have at times, there’s a nice one in Resources below.

At the end of the day, I’m glad I took the time and effort to migrate over to Jekyll. Not only will it save be management time in the future, but I learned new things at the same time. Maybe I’ll even want to post more again.

Resources:

Jekyll Documentation Hacker-Blog Theme Markdown Cheatsheet