One Up

In which I explain why I decided to change everything, again.

Written by Giu · 28 Dec 2011

It happened again: I decided to change my journal's layout, but this time I went further and decided to switch the backend, too. My journal doesn't run on WordPress anymore; instead, it's now served as a bunch of static HTML pages that are generated by the awesome tool that Jekyll is.

If you've never heard of Jekyll, the idea behind it is quite simple: you give Jekyll various types of files (layout files, content files, etc.) written in various markup languages of choice (HTML, Markdown, Textile), and Jekyll will give you a bunch of static HTML pages in return. If you want to learn more about Jekyll, I recommend you to head over to its wiki.

The approach of using Jekyll instead of WordPress brings quite some advantages along that convinced me to do the switch:

1. Every page is statically served, so the server will be able to a) serve the pages much faster, and b) handle quite a lot of incoming traffic should the need ever arise;
2. I don't need a database anymore;
3. I'm using my favourite text editor with my favourite color scheme configured to write this post; I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy right now because of this;
4. I don't need to login using an unsecure connection to manage my journal, and can use SFTP or even a simple git push (see GitHub User Pages) instead (I'm currently using SFTP), and;
5. All I need for my new backend to work now are files containing some markup, meaning I can use git to put everything under version control

I've also decided to restart from scratch with this journal, meaning that you won't find most of the entries from the old journal around here anymore. If you're looking for specific entries from the past, don't hesitate to contact me and I'll look what I can do.

My journal is still under construction at this moment, but I guess it's a good start to have something showing up again after the server transfer.