Jekyll is now running my live site.
Goodbye WordPress - Hello Jekyll
I’ve been relatively happy with WordPress, especially since I haven’t posted very much in the past. I still am using it for some sites, but for this one, no more. Over the 3 day weekend for St. Patrick’s day, I finally finished moving the site between some other smaller work bits and some family time.
Why
So why did I bother moving? Well there are a few reasons listed here:
Terminal/Cli
I live in a terminal, and it’s pretty hard to update WordPress from vim. Now, I can make updating the blog part of my normal work flow, including editing it off-line. Also with git branching, I can have posts in progress. This let’s be just add small bits as I like the merge or PR to move a post live.
Patching/Maintenance
It’s kind of a hassle having to take the time and effort to keep a VM patched and running, along with updating WordPress itself as well as the plugins is kind of a pain when you got dozens of other hosts to worry about. Also there are security concerns if you don’t do this for WordPress. Now it’s GitHub’s problem 😜.
Simplicity
Still taling about the terminal here
I’ve been on a move to more and more simplicity where I can, I’ve started using Alpine for mail again.
This is a terminal based mail client that is based on Pine which was my goto many years ago.
I’ve also started using slack-term for my main work Slack team. I still use
the full featured applications for some heavier tasks, but with tmux I can do
all the things I need to with out taking my hands off the keyboard. Except to pick up
my coffee cup.
Also with WordPress to me it felt like a production to make a post where as using
vim is just putting some of my thoughts down over time then publishing with a git push.
I think this will make it more likely for me to post updates. I have a number of posts
I’ve been wanting to get out, but haven’t felt like going though the “ordeal” of it.
Cost
Well the small vps I was using isn’t much of a cost, but zero < any amount so there’s that.
What’s Next?
Well hopefully more posts (also hopefully useful/interesting). And of course I’ll be poking around Jekyll and seeing what tweaks I can make. Anyone seen any really nice sites built on Jekyll with something especially compelling?
~ Dave
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