This blog has been neglected for some time, to the extent where it’s been pretty much broken for the last few months. This weekend, I had some hours to spare, so I set about fixing it.

My main issue with my blog is that I hate Wordpress. It’s bloated and complicated for my usage, and I don’t like PHP very much. So I decided to change blogging platform.

I was browsing around for some inspiration, and came across Jekyll. I saw that my learned friend Alex Rozanski uses Jekyll, and he is hipster and clever (and his blog is far more worthy of a read than mine), so I decided to give it a go.

Headline: it’s way better for my use case than Wordpress.

It’s very lightweight, it’s quick to make changes, and I get to use Ruby instead of PHP. Having used it for a couple of days, I think it’s really good. I thought I would get annoyed by having to run my whole blog and website from the terminal without a pretty UI to run the whole thing, but I haven’t. I guess my familiarity with Linux and associated tools that I have gained over the last few years has allowed me to feel comfortable using platforms designed in this way.

Despite the positives, there are some issues that I had with Jekyll during the setup process:

  • The documentation is not brilliant. There’s quite a lot of low-level stuff on the Jekyll site, but not a lot of guidance for the basics (what’s the different folders in the app represent, and things like that). As with a lot of very good and new tools, a combination of Google and StackOverflow are the way to go for learning stuff.

  • Jekyll has importers, which allow you to migrate from your old, shitty platform (naming no names) to your new, shiny, hipster platform. My inital thoughts were along the lines of “that’s super useful!”, but my experience with the Wordpress installer were less than favourable. There were encoding issues (I had to globally find and replace backslashes for their HTML encoded equivalent), and lots of markup problems. I don’t think HTML support in Jekyll is anywhere near as good as the Markup support.

So, my transition took a fair bit of time, but I think in the long run, this is a much better solution for me, and probably anyone who is tech-literate.

It’s worth noting that Jekyll is far superior to jesblog, in probably every way. I imagine its creator would dispute this.