I decided that Drupal is too big and awkward for my blog, and I've been wanting to try something new. Drupal was eating up a lot of the RAM on my 512MB server, even after hours spent trying to optimise it. Also, the updates and module updates for Drupal 7 seem endless. Guillermo Garron pointed me towards blogging like a hacker. This post totally sold me on Jekyll. I've probably heard about Jekyll before more than once, but the name kind of blended into a mush of other quirkily-named new technologies trendy web developers rave about. This post really made it sound like something that would be useful to me, though.
Good points:
- manage with Git, and host the source separately (this is maybe my favourite feature. Soon my whole life will be in Git!).
- no need to write in a web browser, or write somewhere else and copy and paste into a web browser
- write in vim or emacs, or any other more natural writing environment - supposedly this might bring me "closer" to my blog, and hopefully will encourage more posting! I want to be able to quickly post smaller posts (microblogs?) without a title and such, and using Layouts might be perfect for that
- no more comments (this is a good thing for me as I think I've decided that comments shouldn't be on a blog in 2012 - blogs have a place but don't do social well)
- lightweight. Faster loading pages (generated static html pages), less memory consumption
- less to manage - eg. Drupal updates, modules
One of the downsides is that it's written in Ruby, which I don't know much about, and the posts are meant to be written in Markdown, which doesn't really appeal to me, although I believe plain HTML works too, as long as you add the YAML Front Matter. See, I told you it was trendy. Just check out the site:
I'm currently trying it out, and this post will be on both the Drupal instance and the testing Jekyll site. Hopefully I'll have it up and running soon. I'm currently working on styling it and making sure all the old posts ported over succesfully. Watch this space!