Moving to Jekyll

I’ve moved from Tumblr to Jekyll.

The straw that broke the camels back with Tumblr was how the CMS handled image uploads. I really hated how Tumblr forced me to use one of their default rendering layouts based on the number of images I wanted to upload, and it required downright hacky behavior to circumvent all that. Tumblr’s competitive advantage is its social network, not its writing platform.

Jekyll is a static-site generator written in Ruby. I decided to go with Jekyll for various reasons, including the ability to fully control my own markup, render the site locally, speed/performance, and nostalgia for the days of static HTML websites. There is a massive irony around here somewhere.

I like the idea of a blog being a testing ground for various technologies – plugins, techniques, layouts, typefaces, etc. I’ve used a lot of the major blogging services up until now – xanga, typepad, blogger/blogspot, wordpress, tumblr – but the more familiar I become with the possibilities of the web, the less I’m satisfied with the current offerings of rich text editors.

Thus, Jekyll.

I originally gave Octopress a long look, but I felt like it provided too much functionality for free. I’d rather learn to roll something from the ground up than strip away features from a framework that I only kind-of understand.

Unfortunately for prospective Jekyll users, the default docs are kind of horrendous. The introduction at jekyllbootstrap is a much better place to start.

Hosting things on github is also really, really awesome.

Any posts predating this post are cherrypicked from old blogs.