Blog Migration to Jekyll
05 Jan 2014I migrated my blog to Jekyll. It generally went well. I'm using s3_website to handle the deployment and, of course, AWS S3 to deliver the thing.
The speed improvements have been fantastic, and not having to worry about my site getting hacked or abused in some way is truly rewarding. As of this posting I've not actually spent any time customizing the layout, and I know some of the older posts are missing their images (working on it!), but it's up and functional. I even managed to retain link structure, which meant that because I'd migrated my comments over to Disqus they just picked up where the old site left off. Yay for all of you!
Jekyll is an interesting platform. Strictly speaking, it's not really a blogging platform. It's a tool for generating static sites. So I write in a basic text editor like the truly awesome Sublime Text, using a markup language called "Markdown"
Once I'm done with a post, I generate the site and it gets deployed. All in all, pretty reasonable process. And should I ever happen to write something truly brilliant, the S3 + Cloudfront deployment means that I won't have to worry about it.
Biggest upsides? No database, lightning-fast performance, able to handle massive traffic, no backend/app/database to maintain, and therefore functionally impossible to hack. Sure, someone could hack S3 or Disqus, but that's not really my problem, and they have armies of smart people on that. I won't be the one with a site suddenly distributing malware because of my lazy sysadmin-ing.
Biggest downside? Everything's manual. This isn't for the feint of heart - you need to know a bit about what you're doing since this is not aimed at the average user. But once it's set up, it's pretty painless.