New blog setup
24 Jul 2013
Moving to a new site
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve recently changed my blog setup. The main difference is migrating off of tumblr and to a statically generated jekyll site. The big driver is pretty simple - over time I started out with the best intentions of blogging, and tumblr got me up and going with such little effort. But over time, the dashboard lulled me into more quick photo posts, reblogs and the like.
The new setup
By moving to a statically generated site, I have the benefit of writing posts in markdown. This should help keep posts focused on content, and less on media. By making it “harder” to write new posts, I picked jekyll because of it’s migrations and simplicity. I keep the pre-rendered content in a git repository, with _site ignored. I use S3 to host the rendered site, and push new versions via jekyll-s3. This is probably the easiest/fastest/cheapest way to host a static website, and there’s a great tutorial on setting this up over on the aws documentation. The great news is that you can now use route53 for A records as well so you don’t have to host the whole thing on a CNAME (like www). I also used zurb foundation for a new basic layout that’s responsive from the start.
TODOs
There are a few things missing right now, though. First, no RSS feed. I know there are lots of good examples, so that’s an easy fix. Same with tags - there are some good plugins, but it’s just a matter of sitting down and setting them up. Creating new posts seems to be a bit of a pain (and draft mode doesn’t seem to make sense?), but I think with a few shell scripts that can be resolved.
Jekyll drawbacks
There are some not-so-great things about jekyll. Writing plugins are a bit difficult, or at least not so-initiutive. I’m also not much of a fan of liquid - I’d much rather just use erb or mustache. Additionally, it’s not very smart about understanding layout dependencies in watch mode, or understanding not to regenerate the whole site when files haven’t been changed. As a result, larger sites can take some time to build.
Enter flue
Flue is my static site generator I’m working on. It’s not at a 1.0.0 state right now, as there are still lots of TODOs, so it’s not a published gem just yet. But you can follow along as I make improvements. I’ve also been using the project to try to brush up on my minitest skills.
update:
RSS feed added. No longer TODO :)
blog jekyll ruby