Jekyll: Moving away from WordPress

Functional Programming in C++

Published by Ivan Čukić in the Other section, on 17 April 2015

In the beginning, I used Blogger. But it was limiting, and had its share of problems.

After a while, I decided to use my own host (ivan.fomentgroup.org) and switch to a mixture of Folite (a small CMS I wrote for my other sites) and WordPress (for the blog section).

This combination has provided my online presence (to use the marketing-speak :) ) since 2009. During that time, WordPress started becoming a huge beast that I had to reinstall quite a few times, and each time to triage which plugins broke it. WP has streamlined its interface, the admin section and everything, but it is quite difficult to manage if you need to dive into its code base.

So I decided to make a change. I decided to switch to a new domain (cukic.co) and to new blogging software.

I looked into Ghost (due to Aaron’s recent switch from Blogger to Ghost), Anchor, Wardrobe and a few other simpler blogging solutions. They seemed nice, but either needed Node.js, or something similar that is not supported by my hosting provider; or they just did not work for some reason.

Then I found Jekyll.

Jekyll is a simple website generator which allows you to create templates, different page layouts with all the power of Ruby and Liquid, to write content in Markdown (and others), and it generates static html files from those that you then just need to upload to the server.

This means that your server just needs to know how to serve files, and you are good to go. It does not need to know PHP, Ruby, JS, or anything else.

Like all systems, it has its downsides.

The first downside is that transferring the posts from WP to Jekyll is anything but simple. There are a few scripts that do this, but they tend not to do the job properly, so you will need to go through most posts to check whether they got correctly converted.

The second one are the comments.

Jekyll supports a few commenting providers (including Disqus) which I am not fond of - I like to have them in my own database. Not in the cloud without any control over the data.

Because of this, I had to write my own Jekyll plugin that stores and loads the comments. Since the post pages are plain html, the comments appear only when I rebuild the site which means that the comments will be moderated.

I am getting notifications when a new comment is posted, so I hope I will not leave them in the moderation queue for too long.

Bhushan Shah
Is the comment plugin you wrote is available somewhere?
gregor
Hi Ivan,
nice to hear that you use a static site generator. I currently working on using pelican (python-based).
One thing with static generators is the integration of discussion. What do you use to provide this discussion feature?
Keep up posting. :-)
Luis
1) Have you tried "isso" ( http://posativ.org/isso/ )? it's a FLOSS comment system that the authors say implement the Disqus API. So maybe it's easy to integrate with Jekyll?
2) Is it possible to provide RSS feeds when using Jekyll?
Willem Sonke
Do you know about Isso (http://posativ.org/isso/)? It basically is an open-source comment system, that you can run on your own server. I use it on my own website (also built with a static site generator) and it works pretty well :)
Ivan Čukić
@Bhushan
Not yet. When I finish the scripts for generating the comment YAML files, I'll post it somewhere.
@gregor
Just a simple php script that pushes the comments to the database. Nothing fancy yet.
@Luis
1) If I'm not mistaken, ISSO is a Python application, and as such not available for my setup. I don't have my own server.
2) Yes, and it is quite trivial. Though, I would not advise creating RSS feeds for all tags and categories - it would be slow. I'm creating the feed for all posts and for planetKDE-tagged ones.
@Willem
ISSO looks quite nice I have to say. Maybe it would be worth to put it on RedHat OpenStack or something. :)