trotsky.us reborn as Jekyll
I’ve been thinking about revamping the Trotsky.us blog for a while now and finally came to the conclusion that since I made the jump from PHP to Rails myself, my blog should too. So it came time to say so long to Wordpress (don’t take it personally, despite what people say, I actually really enjoyed using you and your bizillion features).
So the question became, which RoR blogging platform to use? I checked out the obvious contenders, Mephisto and Typo which seemed ok. But I wanted to do something a bit different this time, and I’d heard a lot of people talk about a static site generator called Jekyll at recent roro Sydney events..
After poking around some nice Jekyll tutorials and getting a Hello World Blog up and running I found myself being pretty impressed with Jekyll. Working with tools such as Vim and Git in my day job as a Rails dev I was immediately drawn in by the pure simplicity of Jekyll. This is blogging, nerd style.
Whether you really need a full Git version history of your blog is debatable but cool nonetheless. And writing on my favourite text editor with no distracitons and in markdown is pure bliss.
If you’re looking for a sea-change from heavyweight blogging engines, give Jekyll a try! It’s not for those who don’t like to get their hands dirty with a bit of setup / configuration but once you’ve got it up and running I’m sure you’ll love it.
