Switched to Github Pages

Transitioning from Webby to Jekyll

When I first began writing on this blog I used the excellent Webby gem to generate a static site from my content. I love this approach considering that I write so infrequently. Combined with comments by Disqus, it was (and still is, in some ways) the perfect solution for me.

Counter to this was the slight pain I had in remembering how to make a new blog post when I did get around to writing, the rake tasks (in a webby wrapper command) to regenerate the whole site, and the process of deploying the resulting html to my own server. I was using a combination of HAML, HTML, Markdown, and Erb at varying degrees of complexity to mark up the site that would be output by Webby. I came to realize this was more than I needed.

Github Pages and the underlying gem, Jekyll, have been available for quite some time now. Given the overall simplicity of the blog I had built, and that, ultimately, most of the content came out to be HTML in the end, I decided to ditch the plethora of markup I was using and make the switch to a more homogenous setup.

The transition was extremely painless. I simply took most of the output from Webby and plopped it into the very simple structure Jekyll uses, along with my images, javascript, and css (all intact). I read up on the Liquid helpers provided and made the quick transition from the post/site syntax used by Webby to the quite similar syntax used by Jekyll.

In the end, my favorite feature is simply git pushing my new content to Github. No self-hosting, no deploying, no hassles whatsoever. I love it! Go ahead and take a look at the repository.