seander's blog 🌵 🌴

Jekyll: The two faces of blog sites

Going back to the future for blogs. Goodbye ghost. Goodbye Gatsby. Hello Jekyll. 🎭

For years, I ran my abandoned personal blog using Ghost. Did I need 99% of its features? Honestly, no.

Despite all the gnashing of teeth regarding “Javascript fatigue”, I then decided to give GatsbyJS a try.

Frankly, that was a mistake.

I think we can all admit that the most difficult part of maintaining a personal blog is actually dedicating the time to, well, actually blogging. (I suppose that’s what’s called creating “content” now.🤮)

And that’s where I had so much trouble with Ghost and Gatsby. Every time, I would sit down to draft something, I found myself having to re-ingest all the necessary context to actually figure out where to write the actual post.

Which directory does it go in? What is the pipeline for processing this post? It’s just HTML, buddy. Why are you doing this to yourself.

What. A. Pain.

So, why Jekyll?

  1. It’s a ruby project. That’s well within my comfort zone.
  2. It looked to be the most simple, out-of-the-box solution. Draft a markdown file. Commit. Push. Done
  3. It was easy to set it up on digital ocean. My last real time investment with digital ocean involved setting up a droplet, cheffing the instance, provisioning nginx. (Overkill, yes. But this was all a deliberate learning exercise.)

The result? Well, so far so good. Not to mention I’m saving about $80 on year on a DigitalOcean droplet that I simply didn’t need to host static HTML.

Anywho. Here’s to hoping I actually commit to writing about something–anything, really, in the next month.

Cheers.

Welcome to the oasis. 🚬 & 🍺