Rohan Shewale's Blog

Moving my blog to Jekyll

January 28, 2017 | 2 Minute Read

Jekyll – a Simple, Blog-aware, Static site generator; now powers this blog. Written in ruby by Github's founder Tom Preston-Werner, and what more, you can host your Jekyll based site on Github for free, to which you can add your own domain name. Though, I'm not moving to Github for hosting my blog, I have moved some of my demos to it.

Why leaving Wordpress?

Wordpress is a wonderful open-source CMS, which I have loved, have been using for around 4 to 5 years, and do recommend to newcomers who have no interest in coding at first. I do consider PHP my primary choice of web language, but PHP is not Wordpress and publishing on Wordpress is more suitable for journalists, content writers, basically anyone who doesn’t enjoy code, now I am not going to rant how good is Jekyll, because there is no common field between the two. Jekyll is not a competitor to Wordpress, it just satisfies my need for continuous interaction of vanilla CSS and JS code.

There are quite a few reason why would anyone want to switch from Wordpress to Jekyll, but Jekyll is not for everyone, well not unless if someone else can set it up for you (if you are lazy enough not to read the official docs).

Is there any benefit?

As I have already mentioned – Jekyll is not for everyone, it your personal taste. And as for any benefit, there is no Database involved! Everything is static so no “wait around” time, that’s good resource handling.

Is it because of Markdown?

Do I love Markdown? Yes!

Is this because of it? No, Wordpress market has dozens of Markdown plugins.

How much time did it take?

  • To find & decide a base theme: 3 weeks
  • To migrate my blog: 1 day

I love minimalistic standard themes and I really wanted to use Chalk theme by Nielsen Ramon, but I decided not to because then I wouldn’t had extended it any further, rather I decided to choose between leonids and long-haul, of which the later became my choice for the base theme even though it was not prepared for collections and pages.

The basics aren’t a hassle to start with, all you have to do is —

  • Install the Jekyll gem
  • Setup a theme, use the basic template or design your own.
  • Start blogging!

— well you do have to build static pages for post, either yourself or schedule it.

I have the repo cloned on my laptop, with a cron job that runs every midnight to generate and upload the files to server, (because some servers :( don’t let you create ruby executables, even thru rvm).