For the past few months I've been wanting to start pouring some of my notes and processes onto the web. I've been using all 3 flavors of DayOne to keep track of most of the things I work on, important dates, things I've learned, or just enriching content like a tweet, or an image. DayOne makes that exceedingly easy with Dropbox.
When I registered this domain, I installed a generic WordPress install with a hacked up version of one of the themes I regurgitated last year. I'm comfortable with WordPress because it's a cake walk to do anything you want, but I didn't need 80% of what WordPress offers. I used SiteCake for a few clients as a test run. It was a step in the right direction, but not quite as light as I was hoping to get. Then I stumbled across Pelican. After a few cries for help, and a lot of help from a friend, I was off and running on Pelican.
It did exactly what I wanted it to do. Took a post written in whatever environment I wanted to write in, and spit out HTML. So I start looking through the templating engine that Pelican used and start familiarizing myself with it. Then I remember Jekyll. If GitHub uses it, then it must be awesome right? Right. Installing it was extremely easy. Since it's built in Ruby, I was able to take all my SASS files and drop them straight into the framework. Amazing.
Posting an entry is just as easy as it was from everything I've used before, and in a lot of ways safer and more reliable. No more databases, no more framework bloat, no more teeming installs with plugins.
As long as stuff like this is around, I'll never go back to WordPress.
How it's running
- No more database driven stats. I've switched from Mint to Reinvigorate (maybe Gaug.es in the future).
- I write my posts in DayOne or Byword.
- I use a rake file to build and deploy the static files to the server. Just as fast as using Git to deploy.
- I still have the site on a GitHub repository, mainly as a way to backup my entries.
- No images. Everything is either a font, or base64 encoded (minus individual post media).
- Video or image content is being served from Rackspace cloudfiles. Faster, and cleaner.
- Fonts served from Typekit.