Daniel D. Johnson


From Wordpress to Jekyll

Until now, my blog has been happily running on WordPress, hosted on a VPS provided by DigitalOcean. Recently I decided I didn't really need all of the complexity of running a VPS just to host my website. So instead, I'm migrating my blog over to Jekyll, a static site generator used by GitHub Pages.

Basically, instead of having all of my layout generated on request, a static site generator builds all of the pages at once, and then just serves the pre-built files on request. That makes it a lot easier to deploy, and you no longer have to worry about security, since there is no dynamic content. An added bonus is that GitHub will build and host the static content of a Jekyll site without making you pay for hosting.

One downside (perhaps?) is that comments don't work out of the box, since comments are by nature dynamic. So I've integrated Disqus to handle my comments on this site, and migrated all the old comments over. Hopefully, everything should continue to work as smoothly as before.