Today, I moved my blog from Dotclear to Jekyll.
Why did I move?
This is a good question; yet, the answer is not purely logical. Indeed, I’m a developer; I love testing new stuff. This is the main reason I chose to move to jekyll.
But while I was moving all (ahem, there are only a few posts on my blog), I realized how Jekyll will help me keep my blog easy to maintain.
Anyway, what is Jekyll?
I’ve been using Github for quite a while now (almost a year) and I love what they did. Reading their blog frequently, I saw a post about Github Pages & Jekyll, and then, people would speak about it on twitter.
Jekyll is a static site generator; it is not a blog engine. Thus, all you have to do is create your posts with Markdown syntax (or textile), then Jekyll will convert them to HTML and generate all the stuff you need to have a nice and functional blog.
I did not use Jekyll from scratch, instead I chose to use Jekyll Bootstrap, it adds useful stuff on top of Jekyll:
- Ready to use folder structure (404, archive, tags, atom feed, …)
- Themes
Is Dotclear that bad?
Of course, not! I’m not a compulsive blogger. As you can see, in nearly 4 years, I’ve published only a few articles. I don’t need all the machinery provided by blog engines such as Dotclear or Wordpress. I’m the only one to write on this blog.
I think Jekyll might motivate me to write more articles since I’m really used to Markdown and using Git’s wiki, I’ll feel more comfortable writing articles.
Was it long?
It took me a whole afternoon to migrate everything from my old (broken) blog to Jekyll, just some copy/paste and some tuning to add the right sidebar badges and links.
It was really easy.
