worrbase

New blog

2011-04-11

I've reworked my blog quite a bit. I transferred my some of my old Wordpress posts to a new blogging engine -- jekyll.

Jekyll is pretty fantastic, in that it generates static sites from posts done in markdown, and templates made with the Liquid templating engine. It's gaining popularity thanks to being the technology that runs github pages.

I heard about it from Ryan Clough a few years ago (before it was cool), and then my friend Russel Harmon encouraged me to start using it for my own blog. Since I accidentally took down my wordpress site sometime ago, I decided to give it a go. I also decided to roll out nginx instead of Apache since my servers are too old to really handle Apache effectively.

So far, I definitely like it. I love writing my blog in vim (the best text editor) and doing version control with git. I still need to set up git hooks to auto-publish when I commit.

I write all of the entries on my OpenBSD dev server, charmeleon, and then push the generated HTML to my web server, so I don't need to bother setting up the jekyll tools on my web server or anything like that.

nginx is fast. It's really fast, and it's trivial to configure (for static sites, anyway). I'm going to keep using it, and possibly try and use it when I set up my personal Diaspora node.