Why I switched from WordPress to Jekyll
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27 Aug 2013
My web hosting provider, Hostlatte was down for over a week. After they resolved their issues, they restored my site to their backup from before I launched this blog. I provided them with a functional local backup copy of the entire blog that I (thankfully) generated before they went down, and it took them a few tries to get the restore correct.
After the restore, the blog was still suffering from WordPress database connection issues, which I believe was due to the hosting provider still being wonky. I have restored using the backup copy I provided Hostlatte, so the restore should have worked. At this point, my patience and confidence was wearing thin, so I decided I wanted to switch providers.
And so, I stumbled upon a simple static blog generator, Jekyll. Neat thing is GitHub Pages provides free hosting that happens to include Jekyll support!
So in an afternoon, I was able to do the following:
- Research and install Jekyll
- Decide if Jekyll was the right tool for the job
- Setup Jekyll development environment
- Migrate from WordPress
- Setup on GitHub Pages
- Setup custom domain for GitHub Pages
The entire setup process is fairly well-documented, including a very straightforward conversion process from WordPress.
Simple, done, painless. Blog RELAUNCHED!