I finally got around to updating my personal website and blog!
My personal website was a quirky custom oddity with ancient demos; it wasn’t responsive, or particularly modern in terms of either aesthetics or code. The blog was a wordpress site that I’ve been making tiny iterative tweaks to for years. It was starting to feel pretty fragile. So, I decided to fix them both in one shot, using Jekyll.
The main reason I chose Jekyll is because it’s a static site generator - there’s something delightfully simple about just ending up with a bunch of html files at the end of the day. As for why Jekyll and not some other static site generator: it’s stable, actively maintained, has been adopted for big and successful projects (e.g. Github Pages), and has a decent sized community. (That’s probably a pretty good checklist to look at when adopting any new technology for a project that needs to be productionable.) An extremely awesome side-effect of this choice is that it’s a file-based system so all of the blog data can be seamless tracked using git.
I decided to compile some of the gotchas I encountered while getting Jekyll set up. You can check those out here: Getting Started With Jekyll. I also made a little list of tips for people who, like me, are migrating a wordpress site to Jekyll: Migrating From Wordpress To Jekyll.