After years of hosting my own site on Wordpress I have moved it to Jekyll.
It came down to three things:
- I am blogging infrequently and maintaining a web server and a Wordpress instance just didn’t seem worth it.
- I am a big fan of Markdown and like the idea of my content source files being in Markdown.
I am hosting on Github Pages for free.- Update: I switched to hosting at Netlify for increased fleixbility. Still in a free tier.
- The workflow is write locally in markdown, push to Github where Netlify picks up the changes and rebuilds the site automagically.
Jekyll isn’t a new CMS, some say it’s dead already with not much development happening, but it’s integration with Github is attractive.
The migration took a few hours with the help of Gemini and a lot of steps and I’m still have features and tweaks to add.
Jekyll is a static site generator and that means it loads fast. And there is no admin to be hacked.
Of course, website traffic has fallen — and continues to fall — due in large part to Google’s AI Overviews (a fantastic feature for users). But I’m still here!
(Photo: Sunset over Badin Lake in North Carolina in April 2014.)