Migrating to Jekyll from WP

A bit of history …

I started blogging way back in 2000, when it wasnt even really a word yet, it was on Opendiary! It was just the start of anyone and everyone able to share their thoughts online. Then moved on to blogger, which was such a great platform at that time, you signed up, and just started writing. And then i discovered wordpress, which more than delivered on its promise of somethign that was fully customizable, as long as you were willing to learn a bit of basic SQL and PHP you could pretty much do anything.

I never had much of a readership, i admit, i think at most maybe 50-100 views a day in the hayday of the old blog but it was more than enough of a motivation, because it was a community. There are bunch of other bloggers i would follow, and interact with in the comments, as they would they, on my own blog. And if you wrote stuff that was somehwat intereting and sicnere, it could be found search engines. Yea this was all before the SEO days.

Around 2008, as i started to enter seriously into my professional life, i had less and less time to blog, and because of an incident or two, it was sort of the beginning of the end, and i wrote less and less. I didnt really miss it, as i did keep on writing occasionally for myself, on paper; until a few years ago, when the urge started to come back. I think it was around the time of COVID, i decided to start again, this time as a means of helping myself feel better about … a lot of things.

Back to WP blogging

The natural choice was to get back to wordpress. Especially since in the meantime, WP had grown a fair bit, inifinite number of themes and number of plugins, and blah blah blah ..

I took my time to find somethign that fit what i was looking for, mixing writing and photography. I admit i did not like that changes to the WP building blocks, i guess becusae it’s a bit too much customization and i’ve grown lazy or something. I plodded on and started the blog going again. Nevertheless i was less motivated than i’d thought i would be. I think the main reason was just how … bulky…and slow i found the whole process.

Part of it is the whole customization thing, takes away from the act of writind i find. Even for a single post. The other thing was that found the whole interface, so … sloooooow!

Markdown for writing, Jekyll for blogging

And then i came across, quite by chance, a website that was run in Jekyll and hosted on GitHub. I’ve been using a fair bit of LaTeX in my school stuff ove rhte past few years, and i liked the look and speed of the site, so i started to dig a bit into Jekyll, and more generally into Static Siite Generators.

I loved the fact that the psots are written natively in Markdown and so i started to test the stuff out a bit, not without difficulty. I know literally no Ruby or anything else that has to do with anythign more than basic Python coding (and i find, sadly, that i’ve been much slower in my uptake of new things like this, probably because i’ve lost my attention span i think).

I also very much came to love how quick Jekyll is, be it when it comes to the site construction or just getting writing done. Now, i have had my share of frustrations, just getting to understand how i can get some customization, but it’s led me down a path to better get to know how Github works, and git in general.

And so here we are, me messing around and more or less figuring my way aroudn things, at least enough to be more satisfied with the final product, than how frustrated i am at not being able to get exactly what i want, and my own lack of ability to figure the solutions out.

Keeping track of things

I think i’m goign to post on the various solutions i might find to my own problems, in case others who are in a similar situation might be able to take advantage of it as well.

Photo taken from the 25th floor balcony of an apartment in uptown Toronto, on a cold wintery night.