As you can see, there has been some changes around here. Aside from switching to a HTML5 and CSS3 powered front-end using @font-face, I’ve also switched the back-end from WordPress to Jekyll.
It all began as I was reading a comic strip about someone who proudly told a developer that he had made a site in some CMS I believe it was. The developer replied that it was stupid, and wondered why he just didn't use Jekyll with a "cap deploy" command. So I wondered; what was this Jekyll stuff?
Turns out Jekyll is a “static site generator” which means it takes template files from different folders and mixes them into a static site. The philosophy is to instead of reinventing the wheel, to use existing tools like markdown, textile and Liquid to create a nice way of managing a website.
I’ll give you more details about my implementation later on in another post. For now, just know that I’ve switched from WordPress to Jekyll for this blog and so far I’m loving it. And I'm using Capistrano and the “cap deploy” command to publish my changes too but that’s nothing new.
Why did I make the switch? We’ll, mostly to learn a new tool but I also love the flexibility that Jekyll offers. It’s very barebones and I like that—makes it easier to change things. After some simple permalink configuration and .htaccess tampering, most of the links are still working as well.
The idea in the future is also that I’ll have this very basic layout template and be able to apply custom CSS with unique styling for some posts, which Jekyll will be an excellent tool for.
I was already writing my posts in HTML back in WordPress, so going to Jekyll seemed natural. Here I can choose to use markdown, textile and other markup languages too but HTML will give me more control if I’m going to have unique styling later on.
Note that I’m not saying Jekyll is better than WordPress. It’s not attempting to be a complete publishing platform. It’s just different, and it suits the purpose of this site.