No More WordPress

So this is my new blog. After having a local WordPress install at this URL for a long time, I’ve concluded it’s not for me, for now. It always felt like overkill and always made me nervous being such a classic target for attacks. Not to mention having to deal with the daily flood of spam comments. There must be a way that is more suited to my needs to just stick some text up on the internet, that doesn’t hurt my eyes. Enter Jekyll.

Static Site

A coworker mentioned he was investigating using Jekyll to create a blog. I started to investigate Jekyll as an option and I was intrigued by the idea of only needing to have static files comprising your site, and doing all of the heavy page generation ahead of time. This means there’s no need to maintain a MySQL install so there’s no complicated backup procedure. Additionally, just having a collection of static files comprising your site means that complicated caching mechanisms to handle large amounts of traffic (not that that has ever been nor will ever be a problem for me) are not necessary. It allowed me to exercise my lacking and out of date HTML and CSS knowledge building a site layout and has, so far, been a fun experience. Plus, posting to your blog from the command line is just so cool.

Posting to your blog with git push

There seem to be a multitude of ways to deploy a Jekyll powered site. Some of them require having Jekyll installed on your webserver as well as any supporting pieces of software like Pygments. I experimented with this a bit using a server from Rackspace Cloud but abandoned it as being even more annoying to maintain than my current WordPress setup since I didn’t already have a server setup for other reasons. Instead, I setup Git on my current Dreamhost account, and hosted a git repository that holds both the source of my blog as well as the generated static files. I then cloned this repo from another directory on my webserver and pointed blog.tallparks.com at the site directory. I then added a service hook to the master repo to have the local clone repo do a git pull every time I push to it remotely. So, creating a new blog post involves creating a new markdown file in my blog source directory, running jekyll, committing changes to the git repo, and pushing to a remote. The folder that holds all of the static files of the site is then automatically updated by the service hook and the blog post is published. A pretty slick setup that is everything I need it to be, and nothing more. Now, to find something interesting to blog about…

Edit: I should also mention that the source for this site is also available on GitHub here