Switching to Jekyll

I just switched this site over to Jekyll. If you'd visited this site early yesterday evening then you wouldn't have noticed a single change — and that was my goal. (The eagle-eyed may have noticed that the URL structures changed a little.) I wanted to be in a position to iterate on the site without having to re-work everything at the same time.

When I first built this site I set it up with pretty simple flat html pages. That was fine until I started adding posts — again, as static pages. Then I cross-linked them. It was already getting pretty clear that this was unsustainable. What's more, it was a barrier to writing. Each time I started tidying and editing some notes, I thought about the hassle of getting the resulting post live.

I was pretty clear I didn't want a full-on CMS. Although I've got a lot of respect for WordPress and a personal soft-spot for Perch I didn't need much if any of the functionality that they offered, and I wanted to keep to the simple iterative approach I'd had in mind.

I tested both Gatsby and Jekyll and found a freedom and delight in both. In some ways it reminds me of first discovering PHP includes and the huge realisation that this would revolutionise (and hugely improve and speed up) my work. For this site I settled on Jekyll as it fit the idea of retrofitting what I already had — and the swift switchover time bears that out. Thanks in huge part to the Jekyll documentation, I was able to switch this (admittedly tiny) site over in a little under an hour.

One day in and I'm already seeing the benefits of this switch. I've been able to simplify, update and re-factor bits of the site almost effortlessly. What's more, posting is now a joy — I work in Markdown, so getting a post (like this one) live is as simple as one line in the terminal.

Now I've just got to resist exploring 11ty…