I love Wordpress. I've been using it since 0.7, and it has stood by my as an easy straight forward blogging system. Wordpress is incredibly flexible and easily extendible.
The problem I have is that Wordpress has become rather bloated lately. It has a lot of features to mess around with, but I've lost the time to care about making sure it is up-to-date. Also I've been wanting to be able to work better offline for a while now.
First Attempts
The first thing I began doing was some research. Not a lot of systems provided what I was looking for, but Jekyll, from one of the guys that works on GitHub, looked promising. I took that, and some of the other systems I found, and used them as inspiration for what I wanted to use.
Some things that I found I liked:
- Writing posts and saving them in markdown
- The ability to view and work on the site offline
- An abstract theme setup. Doesn't have to be much, but and easy way to style the blog would be nice.
- An easy way to store what I write in version control
Jekyll met a lot of these requirements, and inspired even more of them. Tom Preston-Werner's article on why he wrote Jekyll really spoke to me, but Jekyll seemed to have some issues. First it required you to have ruby set up on your server. At the time, I did not have this, nor had I had good luck using ruby gems (which I recently discovered was because I was missing the debian package ruby1.8-dev). So I considered writing my own Jekyll clone in PHP. I didn't get very far, due to the whole me being in school thing and recently releasing Answers.
Jekyll
Since I had recently switched to a new web host (HostGator) which supported Ruby and I had started learning Ruby (thanks to why_'s guide). I decided to port my blog to Jekyll. Setting up the system was straight forward thanks to all of the examples of people using Jekyll already, but I'll give a little overview for those of you interested. The results of me following these steps can be found at icco.github.com.
- Create a new GitHub repository titled username.github.com.
- Add the files _config.yml and README
- Add the folders _posts and _layouts
- Start working on your site. Every time you push to GitHub, your site will regenerate.
- You can also look at this script which will let you import a Wordpress blog.
I still haven't installed Jekyll on HostGator, but using GitHub's support for CNAMEs and post-receive hooks, I'll figure something out.
Resources
Here are a list of places I looked while setting up my site.