Goodbye, Wordpress!

As you may or may not have noticed, this blog has recently undergone a pretty drastic change. Aside from pure design upgrades, I've moved off Wordpress (good riddance!) and joined the geek bandwagon by writing my blog with Jekyll. Here's my obligatory "I moved to Jekyll" blog post!

Why Jekyll?

• Wordpress is bloated. I've never even used a third of the features—I wanted something super simple and lightweight that I could gradually add onto (if I wanted to).
• Custom styling. Wordpress, I've found, is a nightmare to try to style. There are layers upon layers of templates, and I really hate trying to navigate through PHP code. Jekyll, by contrast, is a lot cleaner and easier to deal with.
• Markdown/Vim > Wordpress editor. I've gotten to the point where I basically need to use Vim for everything (code, obviously, but also notes, to-do lists, etc). Markdown is great, and I like how all of my blog posts are now under version control.
• Static pages. Blogs are almost pure static content (with the exception of comments, search, etc), so I figured that it would be simpler (and faster) to just have an entirely static site. This makes deploys super easy as well.

My setup

I'm not going to go through in depth how I got my Jekyll set up, because there are more than enough of those guides out there. Here are some of the main components that I used:

• Standard boilerplate from Tom Preston-Warner himself, with pagination.
• Category generation plugin from Recursive Design.
• Disqus for comments. I don't really buy into the whole argument against using Disqus for static sites (that it defeats the purpose of having a static site).
• RSS feed template from Recursive Design.

All of the templates and styles are handwritten. Being able to customize all aspects of the blog is definitely one of the major perks of using Jekyll!