Justkez.com » A brief posting

Having recently heard about Jekyll from a Hacker News posting, I felt the urge of website change stir within me.

Justkez.com has been run through Wordpress for many years now (since 2006), but it has got to a point where I just wasn't comfortable with it - felt too clunky.

Why Jekyll?

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby, with support for Markdown documents for blog posts. I have been writing postings in Markdown for the last year, so it seemed a logical move. With the working world taking over a lot of my time, I become less bothered about the latest plugins, or publishing widgets.

As such, a few of the old posts didn't make the cut, and some of the more popular ones have been polished up a bit; there shouldn't be too many lost links.

Speed boost

In a very rudimentary test, the previous Wordpress version could dish out 3.5 requests per second (ab -n 20), the statically generated Jekyll version is serving at 24 requests per second; something you would call statistically significant.

Living with Jekyll

As a result of the migrating...

• Writing posts is much more straightforward, and I can punt the markdown files around on whichever computer is to hand

• I have learned to --love-- use the Liquid templating engine; not quite my ideal, but it works

• I am a lot more inclined to put postings together; everything just feels cleaner

So, if you're tempted by any of the above, give Jekyll a go.

Justkez.com is produced by Kester Dobson.
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