“Whenever a client wants to do something really tricky my default is to try to figure out if we can service their needs with a static html website. It never works but it’s still fun to try.”

I’ve been writing on wordpress now for over 10 years and I’ve finally decided to get cool, enjoy the process even more and move my content to Jekyll on GitHub.

Cost and Load Time.

Here’s why I even bothered looking into change.

“Why are you paying for computing power to run a blog?”

  1. AWS has started sending me $30AU/month bills to keep my wordpress site up and running.
  2. Wordpress runs really slow. I literally have to “wait around” for the page to load.

Following that I’ve found a bunch of other nice things about Jekyll :)

I’m a Developer. I like flexibility.

The experience of publishing with wordpress is more suitable for journalists, content writers, basically anyone who doesn’t enjoy code.

Working with Jekyll brings me close to the front end code and allows me to be a little more creative and efficient.

With a whole new world of distributed web technologies it’s now quite a straight forward exercise to handle things like “membership”, “ecommerce”, “document store”, and “data” via javascript connected services like UserApp, Firebase, Snicart, SendOwl and other things.

I like the way my blog is now much more transparent in regards to versioning and asset storage.

It’s not because of my love for Markdown

Wordpress and every other blogging engine nowadays has a markdown plugin to bring that sort of thing into your life when you need it.

I am a Markdown fanboy but I didn’t make this change for the sake of Markdown. I already had that spinning in Wordpress.

How long did it take?

It took me one day to faff around with Jekyll’s templating strategy and one day to migrate my wordpress content using various fun things like sublime group editing and powershell.

Two days.

This blog is now Jekyll generated and hosted on github pages. Was the page load snappy?