It’s been quite a while since I’ve rebooted my blog. So, I present to you the latest incarnation. I decided to finally migrate from a self-hosted WordPress blog to Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator.
In my opinion, blogs should really be a set of static files, since each post is create once, and updated rarely. This has several benefits:
- Scaling is easy. Serving static files is trivial.
- Highly secure. There is no app to hack.
- Everything is stored as plaintext, which neatly side steps any legacy format issues.
And finally, having my blog as simple text files (flavored with Markdown) makes the minimalist in me very happy.
If you want to get started with Jekyll, I highly recommend the exhaustive guide written by Paul Stamatiou.
I’ve also shared my Jekyll blog template on GitHub. Go ahead and use and modify it for your own purposes.
A Throwback
There’s actually been a lot of chatter around static site generation with tools like Jekyll and toto. But this is nothing new. I remember launching my first blog back in the late 90s as static files, and then moving to an early version of MovableType which required static regeneration whenever you created a new post.
It’s funny how old tech re-emerges again as a response to over-complication.