For a long time, my personal website was run on WordPress through a hosting service I paid an annual fee for. When I started, WordPress was still a relatively hot thing, and the WYSIWYG, themes, and plugin capabilities were nice since I was still new to websites and web development. Also, since I maintained multiple websites, having a single platform like Wordpress that I could easily monitor and run through the same host was nice.
As time has gone on, I’ve whittled down the number of sites I’m maintaining. For my personal website specifically, all I really wanted was some basic web presence and blog capability, and I didn’t want to pay for a blogging platform. At the same time, I still wanted the ability to customize it through code, and ideally through a simple platform that wasn’t as heavy as WordPress.
Given this, I finally decided to port my site to Jekyll so it could be hosted for free on github pages. I’m not a huge fan of Ruby and RubyGems-based package management having dabbled in Ruby on Rails, but accepted that this was the cost of entry. Overall, it was a straightforward process, but I ran into some small hiccups that I wanted to document for posterity here:
- tThere’s so much less bloat! No need for a separate hosted service, no need for constantly updating multiple plugins, no need for running a WordPress cache plugin to speed up simple page loading. Static site generation is nice.
- Transferring posts was a pain. I ended up manually porting each page. Also, wordpress has some nice image resizing features, which jekyll doesn’t.
- Adding analytics is easy.
- Using gem installation was difficult for replicating a custom index page with the blog as a subpage.
- You lose some nice features of WordPress themes, like searching through posts and category widgets.
- Importing the wordpress export directly into disqus fails because the jekyll pages end with
.html. So I had to replace the non-html extension links with .html