Moving from WordPress to Jekyll

This is my first post after a very long hiatus partially induced by a migration of my blog from WordPress to Jekyll, which I started half an year ago and never quite finished.¹

I wasn’t particularly unhappy with WordPress, but some things there irritated me - for instance it was hard to edit my posts within my beloved Emacs.² Accidentally I’ve stumbled upon the post “Blogging like a hacker” and I instantly knew Jekyll was what I needed. It allows me to create my posts as simple markdown templates, allows me to embed logic written in Ruby in them and it has built-in support for code highlighting (using the excellent Python library pygments). It also allows me to store my blog under version control in GitHub which is really nice.

Jekyll is not particularly well documented and I had a few problems with it at first, but I managed to overcome them quickly. One thing that will be problematic for some people is the need to add things like RSS feed, commenting and analytics manually (they are bundled in a solution like WordPress). On the other hand - you’re not tied to anything in particular and may choose the service you like the most. I chose Disqus for the comments and Google Analytics for the site analytics.³

By the way - my old WordPress blog Devcraft is no more. My new Jekyll blog has a new domain (batsov.com) and a new theme (based on my favorite coding theme Zenburn). I know that the blog is currently pig ugly and the content is not particularly great either, but I’ll try to improve this along the way and add a lot of interesting and hopefully useful information.

1. Until today, that is. ↩

2. And yes - I know all the options available and I hate them all. ↩

3. What a surprise, right? ↩