This week I migrated this blog from Wordpress to Jekyll, a popular static site generator. This post explains why and how I did this, maybe it will be useful to someone.

Why?

Wordpress powers thousands of websites, is regularly updated, has a ton of features. Why did I abandon it?

I still think Wordpress is great for a lot of websites and blogs, but I felt it was overkill for my simple website. It had so many features I never used and this came at a price: it was hard to understand how everything worked, it was hard to make changes and it required regular security updates.

This is what I like most about Jekyll compared to Wordpress:

• Maintainance, security: I don't blog often, yet I still had to update Wordpress every few weeks or months. Even though the process is pretty straight-forward, it got cumbersome after a while.
• Setup: Setting up a local Wordpress instance with the same content and configuration was annoying. I never bothered so the little development I did was directly on the webserver. This didn't feel very good or safe. Now I just have to install Jekyll, clone my repository and generate plain HTML files. No database to setup. No webserver to install (Jekyll comes with a little webserver, see below).
• Transparency: With Wordpress, the blog posts were stored somewhere in a MySQL database. With Jekyll, I have Markdown files in a Git repository. This makes it trivial to backup, view diffs, etc.
• Customizability: After I started using Jekyll, customizing this blog (see below) was very straight-forward. It took me less than a few hours. With Wordpress I'm sure it'd have taken longer and I'd have introduced a few security bugs in the process.
• Performance: The website is just some static HTML files, so it's fast. Also, when writing a blog post, I like to preview it after writing a paragraph or so. With Wordpress it was always a bit tedious to wait for the website to save the blog post and reload the page. With Jekyll, I save the markdown file in my text editor and, in the background, jekyll serve immediately updates the site, so I can just refresh the page in the browser. Everything runs locally.
• Hosting: In the future I may move this blog to GitHub Pages or another free/cheaper host.

Why Jekyll?

I went with Jekyll because it's widely used, so there's a lot of documentation and it'll likely still be around in a year or two. Octopress is also popular but under the hood it's just Jekyll with some plugins and changes, and it seems to be updated less frequently.

How?

I decided to use the default template and customize it where needed. I made the following changes:

• Links to previous/next post at the end of each post, see post.html
• Pagination on the homepage, based on the docs. I also changed the home page to include the contents instead of just the post title.
• Archive page, a list of posts grouped by year, see archive.html
• Category pages. I wrote a small plugin to generate a page + feed for each category. This is based on the example in the plugin documentation. See _plugins/category-generator.rb and _layouts/category.html
• List of categories in the header of each post (with a link to the category page), see post.html
• Disqus comments and number of comments in the header of each post, based on the docs, see post.html. I was able to export the Wordpress comments to Disqus.
• In _config.yml I changed the post URL format ("permalink" option) to not include the category names. This way links to my posts still work.
• Some minor tweaks here and there.

I still want to change the code highlighting style, but that can wait for now.

Conclusion

After using Jekyll for a few hours, I'm a big fan. It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful. If you're tired of Wordpress and Blogger, or just want to experiment with something else, I highly recommend giving it a try.

http://jandemooij.nl/blog/2015/10/03/bye-wordpress-hello-jekyll