Moving to Jekyll

I had been using Rails to run my site for a few years now. I love Rails. I use it daily. I even wrote a blogging gem for it, which has attracted a small to moderate number of users, largely due to a mention on the Ruby5 podcast 2 years ago during RailsConf. At the time, I thought it was really important that Rails developers use Rails tools.

But I’m not a Rails developer: I’m a full-stack developer. I still love Rails–I still use it daily–but I use JavaScript and a host of other tools on a daily basis as well, and as much fun as it would be to port a blogging gem to node.js… actually, I don’t think I’d enjoy that at all. Sure, it might be an interesting exercise, but there are much more interesting things to use node for, and much more interesting things to do with my time. So when Rails 3.1 came out, and my blog app broke, I couldn’t bring myself to invest time in upgrading it… I wasn’t even sure if it made sense in the Rails ecosystem anymore. And, as it turns out, there are much simpler systems I can use.

Jekyll is such a system. Rather than running on top of Rails, it’s a static site generator that accepts blog posts written in markdown/textile. Which suits me fine, because the blog aspect of my site was the only dynamic part of it. Everything else was done through JavaScript and web services.

So for the time being, all of my old articles are missing. Soon, I hope to import my old articles into Jekyll. I’m hoping though that the flexibility of being able to edit articles in an offline editor will allow me to write more often as well. We’ll see how it goes.