Going Static

By now you may have noticed the new décor of my site - the even more observant of you may have also noticed that my blog has migrated from Wordpress to Jekyll.

Besides the fact that all the cool kids have been moving their blogs away from Wordpress, there were three main reasons for the switch:

• The plethora of Wordpress and PHP related security vulnerabilities that are floating around these days.
• Speed. Nothing beats serving static HTML.
• I don’t have to worry about a Ubuntu update breaking anything in my LEMP/LAMP stack - which makes patching security updates a nightmare.

Happy days.

Game of Themes

I’ve adapted the great theme Hyde made by Mark Otto and added a few things like SASS via jekyll-assets and changed a few other things - some small like the fonts, others slightly bigger like removing the sidebar. I’m also proud to say that my site does NOT use jQuery. Yes, no jQuery!

Feel free to grab the theme on Github and try it yourself.

Deploying Jekyll

Deployment is easily done via the use of rsync and adding Rakefile that looks like the following code to your blog’s directory.

#rake generate
task :generate do
puts '* updating jekyll site'
system 'jekyll b'
end

# rake rsync
desc 'Uses rsync to push the contents of ./_site to the server.'
task :rsync do
puts '* rsyncing the contents of ./_site to the server'
system 'rsync -acvz -e "ssh -p $PORT_NUMBER" _site/ user@example.com:/dir/to/website/root/www/example.com/'
end

# rake deploy
desc 'Deploy the content to the server.'
task :deploy => [:generate, :rsync] do
end

Then it’s just a matter of typing rake deploy in your blog’s directory to push your new contents to your web server. That’s one less excuse I now have for my dreadfully lacklustre rate of posting.