After a few years with Wordpress on a VPS server, I've moved this site over to Jekyll running on GitHub Pages.

Jekyll is a framework for building static sites from template files, which is vastly different to the database-oriented CMS model of Wordpress. As such, it lacks some of the more dynamic features of Wordpress (such as locally-hosted comments), but for this site the switch made a lot of sense for a number of reasons:

• Jekyll has code highlighting support built-in. In contrast I spent a whole evening trying to find a decent plugin for Wordpress.
• Jekyll supports markdown, so I can write my posts in Macdown to get a decent "live" preview as I write.
• Wordpress uses a combination of filesystem storage and database storage to hold content, which is a bit of a pain when it comes to migration and backups. Jekyll keeps everything in one filesystem, which means…
• I can keep a full history for the site in Git, so I can keep track of post changes and easily roll back if I break anything
• Jekyll has a built in command for running a local server, so it's far easier to fiddle with theme changes without messing up the live site
• Being static, all the work is done up-front, so pages are served blazingly-fast
• Lacking dynamic content is no biggie. I've been using Disqus for comments for years.
• No need to manage my own server, just set up my repo in GitHub for serving the site via GitHub Pages.
• GitHub Pages is FREE

The move was complicated a little by the history of this site, namely that it was originally a Drupal project prior to Wordpress, so I had some iffy legacy permalink stuff going on. But the problems weren't insurmountable, especially given just how flexible Jekyll is. More on that over my next few posts…