I realized a while back that hosting my blog on Wordpress was doing me no favors. I was paying about $10 a month for WordPress hosting on DreamHost (who is fantastic, by the way) to have a site that was slow and who’s editing experience wasn’t ideal.
I wanted to write in Markdown, too. Preferably using my preferred editor (VSCode) with my preferred Keybindings (Vim, thankyouverymuch!). There are plugins for Markdown in Wordpress I used, but they were pretty clunky too.
So, I finally bit the bullet and converted over to using Jekyll hosted for free on Github pages. You can see the source code for the blog here.
Jekyll has so many wonderful theming options to choose from for a backend engineer who has no design taste! I chose the Clean Blog Jekyll theme, which looks a lot like the old theme of my site, but a little more fresh with nicer typography.
The process of the export was very easy with help from the Jekyll Exporter Wordpress plugin and Bob Gale’s “From Wordpress to Jekyll” post. I kept all my canonical blog URL’s with barely any effort.
What a wonderful change: I’m writing this with my Vim keybindings, and I can source control the whole thing. I’m in heaven here, folks.
And you, dear reader, benefit from a crisp new design and near instantaneous loading times because the whole site is static. No more waiting for Wordpress to load folks, you just get to my content faster. Which I’m sure you’ve been dying for.
Happy new year!