Picture of screenshot of writing this post Screenshot of the writing process of this post. Note the live-local server running, which allows me to see updates to this post as I write it.

This blog was previously hosted on Bluehost, with a Wordpress instance.

In the last week of December last year, I decided to shift this to Jekyll, with a private Github repo, which then publishes the blog on Github Pages as a static site.

Why?

The main reason is not just cost, but speed.

To post on my self-hosted Wordpress, I needed to:

  1. write the post, which I usually do in Markdown.
  2. open my browser and log onto my Wordpress admin dashboard. This usually takes 5+ mins, as Bluehost is American domiciled, so it’s a bit laggy.
  3. use a Markdown importer to import my post into my blog.
  4. Edit the content with block editors, because there’s usually something screwed up. This usually takes a long time: many clicks required.
  5. Manually upload pictures and assets.
  6. Finally, click “upload”.

In contrast, to write this post (with the picture):

  1. I copied this post from a previous post in my iTerm
  2. ran “bundle exec jekyll serve” from an iTerm window, which allowed me to open a local version of the page on my browser.
  3. wrote and edited live in Markdown, in Vim.
  4. when I’m happy with the post, to save and run “bundle exec jekyll build”
  5. git add, git commit and git push to my private repo.

And that’s it!

Writing a post like this, with the picture, would easily have taken me about 30 mins or more on Wordpress.

It’s much smoother and faster on Jekyll.

Tags #jekyll

Written on: 5 Jan 24 at 21:42
Finished on: 5 Jan 24 at 21:57