Moving My Blog to GitHub Pages from Wordpress.com
Introduction
I recently moved my personal blog to GitHub Pages from Wordpress.com. I have been thinking about doing it for sometime and this time I finally did it. And in this post I wanted to share the a few things about it.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- What this post is and what it is not
- What are GitHub Pages?
- What is Jekyll?
- Why Jekyll?
- Why did I do it?
- How did I do it?
- Is it worth it?
What this post is and what it is not
This post talks about about how I made the switch to Jekyll and GitHub Pages from Wordpress.com and the reasons behind it. It is not a rant about Wordpress.com.
What are GitHub Pages?
GitHub Pages are public static webpages hosted and published through GitHub, completely free of cost. The source code of the website is also hosted in a public repository in GitHub.
What is Jekyll?
Jekyll is a static site generator. Contents are written in simple HTML or Markdown and it creates static HTML pages out of it. It uses Liquid, a simple templating language which makes it very easy to have custom templates designed for all your pages and when you run Jekyll, it automatically combines the contents and the templates togethe and creates the final static pages.
Why Jekyll?
Although I did not do any extensive comparison between Jekyll and the other similar solutions, Jekyll seemed one of the best choice to start with because:
- GitHub Pages have supports for Jekyll out of the box.
- Although it is written in Ruby, it does not require any knowledge of Ruby to use it.
- It seemed to have the right blend of simplicity and features.
Why did I do it?
I have been blogging with Wordpress since 2011 and when I started, it did seem one of the best choices out there. It’s easy to start with, it has a nice editor, there are a lots of ready-to-use themes to choose from, there is a vast community of users, so finding help was never much difficult. But over the years, my expectations about the way I blog have evolved, new needs have emerged. Here are the main reasons why I made the switch.
Freedom
Although Wordpress.com has supports for themes and many aspects of the themes are customizable, the free version does not allow one to completely edit the themes and have a completely customized look and feel. Often times I don’t need all the bells and whistles that come with a full blown theme but I want certain things in certain way. For example, I like to show a page listing all my post titles and links to my visitors which was apparently very hard to accomplish if not impossible with Wordpress.com.
Simplicity
With GitHub Pages and Jekyll, everything is very transparent. The whole project is just a collection of a few markup files, images and configurations. There is no database. There is no fancy editor. There is no bloat of features. Out of the box, you get nothing more than a static HTML page. But it’s easy to add the features you need whether they are natively available or by using third party services.
Vim and Markdown
Vim is my editor of choice and I extensively use it wherever I can. And when in some cases, I have to use another editor, I always look for ways to enable vi like key bindings. Markdown is a simple markup language that makes it stupidly simple to write in rich text and is way better than WYSIWYG editors in browser in my opinion. Blogging with Jekyll and GitHub Pages gives me an option to use both vim and markdown.
The ability to work offline
Because the whole repository of source files including the posts are cloned locally and Jekyll server is so easy to setup and run, an added advantage of this approach is the ability to create posts and preview them locally without the need to reach to the internet before publishing them on GitHub.
How did I do it?
The starting point was to head over to the GitHub Pages Getting Started page and follow the instructions for creating a project with one simple HTML page with one of their featured css themes. After that I followed the Step by step tutorial for setting up a Jekyll blog that walked me through from installing Jekyll to creating HTML templates for the pages to writing my first blog post in markdown.
But at this point, the resulting site is so basic that if you are coming from a feature-rich platform like Wordpress.com, you’ll see a lot of missing features, features that you always took for granted. Here you will have to add them manually either by adding small snippets of code or plugins or by using third party services.
Site map
Site map is a dedicated link on your blog that will contain the list of pages and URLs from your blog. Adding a site map is effortless in Jekyll if you use the Jekyll-sitemap plugin.
But what about comments?
An essential part of a blog site is the support for comments for the posts. But Jekyll being a static site generator lacks inbuilt ability to support comments. For that, I used a third party service called Disqus. They offer a Basic tier that should be more than sufficient for a personal blog site.
But isn’t the site looking empty?
So I imported my older posts from the previous blog to this one and with the Jekyll-import plugin, it was not much of a hassle. True, I had to do some editing to the imported posts to fix a few style related issues.
Search engine optimization
Jekyll-seo-tag plugin automatically generates metadata and tags for search engines and social networks sites for better indexing. Also you can manually add tags and metadata to each posts.
Is it worth it?
Absolutely. Now every time I want to write a new post, I just need to do this in my terminal.
vim
<Type content in markdown>
git add
git commit
git push
And my new post post is published without ever having to leave the comfort of the command line. Can it get any simpler than this?