Now Powered by Jekyll

I've made the leap over from WordPress to Jekyll. Static sites are just easier, faster and more secure :thumbsup:

Honestly, what hasn't been said about Jekyll? Static sites are definitely the way to go. I've been hearing about vulnerabilities in WordPress and Drupal on and off, even more so since listening to security podcasts like Risky Biz.

What I never thought I'd say is my site is now somewhat...open-source? You can find all of its code on my GitHub project calvinbui/calvin.me. There, you can find some drafts I'm working on as well if you want to spoil yourself.

To sum up my own experience for the transition:

  • Was a pain to get it transitioned properly, total time 1.5 weeks
  • Used exitwp to convert it over, not a perfect tool.
  • exitwp didn't run too well on Windows, had to use a Linux machine.
  • exitwp didn't like how my site was self-hosted, had to transition it over to WordPress.com first.
  • Images did not link properly but with some magic find and replace regex I was able to link them all properly.
  • Images with captions did not display properly as they weren't supported, but I overcame that
  • WordPress galleries did not transition over.
  • No Jekyll themes supported a 'featured-image' of any sort. This was also added manually by me.
  • Code blocks and lists didn't go well together. This was worked around by just not using lists.
  • The GitHub pages gem is running into issues at the moment so the whole time what I was seeing locally was different from what eventually appeared.
  • Creating pull requests led to GitHub unicorning. I believe it was because I forked from the Jekyll Now theme so I had to just start fresh to get rid any issues there.
  • YouTube embeds worked with some tweaking to stretch them out a little.
  • Moving comments over from Disqus was easy enough.
  • The list of approved plugins is appalling. Couldn't make use of the Jekyll Archives plugin to create categories.
  • At least the site is faster? (not really)

I'm happy with how it eventually turned out despite the trouble. It is much simpler to read and make changes to. I don't need a slew of plugins to get everything running perfectly like on WordPress, because it just works.

Other notes:

  • Security is not as big of a concern, the only way in is through GitHub, CloudFlare or Namecheap.
  • Response and speeds are now managed by GitHub and CloudFlare CDNs.
  • Free hosting I guess?
  • This list probably repeats what everyone else has already said :pensive: