From WordPress to Jekyll

Well I never thought the day would come where I'd move away from WordPress for my personal website. I've been using WordPress since 2009 and it has changed a lot since I started using it. Don't get me wrong, I still love WordPress and I do plan on contributing to it, but I want to give Jekyll a try. The main thing that drew me to Jekyll is the use of markdown and YAML for everything and I definitely love both of those things; using this combination definitely beats writing a WordPress plugin to handle custom data. I will admit, making a theme for Jekyll is far simpler especially since I've started working with Symfony which uses Twig; Liquid is very similar to Twig so it's incredibily simple for me to get used to. Adding real time information to Jekyll is a pain since there is no server side processing; everything is static (no shit, sherlock). By using JavaScript and APIs, I can get by with having some dynamic content; although for the 1% of people who don't have JavaScript enabled, you just can't fully experience my awesome site.

I am going to really miss reading all of the password combinations, I just might create a dummy page just to continue reading them. I mean who wouldn't want to see admin:pussy69 in their failed login logs?

By moving to Jekyll, it has given me a great opportunity to clean up my website and finally organize things properly so this was the perfect moment. Not only will I be cleaning up all of my pages, I will also be deleting a lot of blog posts that I've written in the past that I'm just embarrassed about.

Since I just started using Jekyll here are some immediate pros and cons:

Pros

• Much faster load times
• Quicker and simpler theme development
• No need for a database with a lot of different entries
• Nothing to hack...

Cons

• Lack of server side processing
  • I am unable to have any dynamically generated content; I will be forced to create my own API and use other APIs to generate some dynamic content. On the bright side, I will be able to practice my JavaScript more

So far, I'm satisfied with Jekyll and I'm hoping I'll be able to continue using it and hacking on it by writing my own Jekyll plug-ins.

Also, there are a lot of shit designs out there for Jekyll websites. I do have to say, mine is pretty awesome in comparison.