Moving to Jekyll

Nick Gerakines - - December 20, 2008

I’ve had my eye on Jekyll for a short while now and finally decided to make the switch. This is my fourth major CMS change since I started this blog way back when. I’m pleased with the idea of moving to a much simpler publishing system and I’m happy with the results so far.

This all started a few weeks ago when Jekyll caught my eye as a project on GitHub. One of the things I really like about MT is it’s publishing model of building out static content. When I saw that Jekyll did the same thing and that it was made with version control in mind, it didn’t take long for me to finally start using it.

I also saw today that GitHub will allow user domains using Jekyll as the publishing system for that content. That is such a great idea, using git repositories as a way to allow users to create blogs, documentation sites and whatever else suits them. There are a bunch up so far and mine can be found at ngerakines.github.com. I plan on taking advantage of the ability to create subdirectories for repositories to display project documentation and related material.

What I love about this most is that I’m writing this blog entry from the comfort of TextMate. To publish this entry, I’m just got to commit and push the change to the socklabs-blog repository on GitHub and have it work it’s way to the machine that is actually serving the static content.

I’m still debating on storing some of the extra stuff like images and files that technically are a part of my blog but indirectly on GitHub. I think I’ll hold off on that for now. The only down side to this transition is that many of the links on the site have changed. I suppose there are worse things though.

The transition from MT to Jekyll wasn’t that bad. I created a small Erlang module that dumped the mt_entries table into individual files for the _posts directory. I’ve been using Markdown to compose blog entries, so that wasn’t an issue for me.



Categories: Blogs  Nick Gerakines  

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