Brendan Horan Avatar

What happened to the old Blog??

Good question.

A good friend recently introduced me to a static site generating frame work called Jekyll. I trust is opinion a lot on software and he was right, Jekyll is nice.

Jekyll uses Ruby to build a static Blog site for you. Thats right, the Blog you are reading now is just static.. No DB's NO scripts No PHP nothing..

Of course you need to add a style/theme and content into Jekyll. In my case I have used a slightly modified WordPress theme.

All the posts are now written in markdown syntax. I am using github's version its called redcarpet. Markdown is very handy and very simple. I now can write all Blog posts in vim. Think of markdown as a very simplified version of html, only much better. Take a look at the how simple the syntax really is.

So if Jekyll builds a Blog, where are you hosting it?

I am hosting on my own web server provided by Hetzner Before you ask I pay for the hosting myself, in no way did Hetzner give anything to me. Hetzner are a very good company and there service is outstanding.

Given that Jekyll is just static content I have opted to use Nginx to serve up the page your viewing right now. Nginx is extremely easy to use and excellent at serving up static content.

Lastly I use Amazon's CloudFront CDN to serve the blogs images. There was an 60% increase in page load times when serving them from the local box. I don't like to wait, and nor should you. Thats when I decided to add the CDN. Amazon is cheep and most impartially I retain ownership of the content I place into the CDN.

So you like the new Blog and want to leave a comment...

You will soon notice that you can't leave any comments, remember it's a static site. There are services out there that can fix this for you, disqus comes to mind. Sadly there terms of service disagree with my ideals. They (disqus) OWN the content in the comment system. Not me, not you but some corporate company. So until such time that I find a way to add comments and own my content this Blog will have no comments, sorry!

What was wrong with word press ?

Well nothing is wrong with WordPress's blogging software. The issue is with the hosted free version of WordPress. Just like disqus, they OWN your content. Check out this gem. Every time you submit content into your free blog you give WordPress the right to "a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content" I want my work to be covered under a diffrent license. Its my work, my effort. I won't be giving it away just to WordPress.

Why not host your own instance of WordPress then?

After all I would still own the content. I don't want the hassle or complexity needed for that. Jekyll meets and exceeds my needs.

Lastly, I wanted to learn more about running a web site and web technologies like Jekyll and bootstrap etc.

I hope you like the new site. If you have feedback, please use the feedback form for now.