I Rebuilt My Blog With Jekyll

In the pursuit of speed and adding more nerdery into my self (plus following the kool kidz), I re-built this blog with a new design and new technology, and for once, it’s not WordPress, or even PHP!

From WordPress to Jekyll

There’s countless blog posts out there detailing how to migrate WordPress to Jekyll, but I decided to start from scratch and just move the important posts manually, there were only a few. No biggie.

Installing Jekyll was a simple as running sudo gem install jekyll in Terminal and I was up and running. Learning Liquid, its templating engine, was simple too, and proven its self to be very powerful.

The Design

This was one of the first designs I did in Photoshop first. That’s right, I went against the grain. As a developer, I typically get taken over down by semantics, clean code and efficiency. This is all good when building a site, but if you’re designing it at the same time, it’s seriously constraining. I imagine how something would look, realise I couldn’t build it in 5 lines of code and scrap the idea.

Instead, I took to Photoshop for the initial design concept and little details. I did one home page, sat on it for a week then built some static pages using that design. Then, I changed a few design details and integrated it with the really simple template engine used in Jekyll, Liquid.

Ass the site is built and compiled locally, I wrote the CSS in LESS and compiled locally with the Mac app.

My Publishing Process

This is the more nerdy part. I write a post in Markdown, add a file in the /blog/_posts/ folder called 2011-10-18-new-blog-in-jekyll.md and paste my Markdown in there. When the site’s compiled, that Markdown is converted to HTML alongside the template, producing a static HTML page with everything in it.

Once all changed, updated & compiled, I check in with Git and push to Beanstalk. Then, when I’m ready for the post to go live, I deploy it with Beanstalk, which I can do from my Mac of iPhone.

What about comments?

I’m not really bothered. In my little blogging experience, they’re mostly unused, one in ten posts on my old blog getting a comment. Instead, I’ll let the conversation happen on Twitter.

Want to know more?

Send me a tweet on Twitter and let me know, I’m happy to do a few posts on it and share some of my code snippets I’ve accumulated.