Goodbye Wordpress, hello Github (Jekyll)

It has been a while I’m not writing in this blog. I have my reasons but the main one is because I’ve been busy migrating the whole website from Wordpress to Github (time ago I also moved my CV on Github). To be more precise I moved to Github Pages.

With Github pages you can set up a website for every project you have on Github or you can set up a “personal” website (linked to your username.github.io repository on Github).

The underlying technology is Jekyll (yes, written in Ruby… :-/). You need to install it on your computer is you are migrating an existent website to Jekyll or if you want to customise your website even more. The reasons I move to Github Pages are summed in the following video

The old website was composed from:

• digitalocean.com server, which I strongly suggest (grab my referral!)
• Wordpress installation (theme and software updates)
• Mysql installation (backups, data restore, schema upgrades, etc…)
• scripting around maintenance

The overhead for a simple website was simply too much: software updates and upgrades, schema migrations, backups, data restores, dying processes, dying processes and many other tasks which were time consuming.

The new website is composed from:

• git repository (yes, that’s right!) :)

No databases, no schemas, no servers, no passwords, no hacks, no software updates, no dying processes, no downtime (well there might be, but Github will fix it for me) and backups are already included!

So if you already use Github, wait no more! Set up your website now!

If you want to migrate your existent website to Jekyll… Well, good luck! :) Joking apart, the process might not be so straightforward as a lot of things need to be ported/configured:

• posts and pages: Jekyll is blog aware so you can export to it from the majority of blog softwares (check it here). Although my blog was on Wordpress this took me plenty of time as now always the export works as expected. I’ve used both scripts and manual work to do a proper migration
• comments: as there is no database you need to use an external service. I’ve chosen DISQUS
• URLs: I’ve mapped as much as I could the old URLs with the new ones
• theme: I went for Minimal Mistakes as the documentation is just excellent and I love the clean design!
• custom code: depends how many plug-ins you used in your previous platform, you might end up in writing plenty of custom code to keep the same functionalities

Well, if you have any question I bet you can find my contact or comment this post

Blogging with VIM and publishing with git push is just priceless! :)