Yesterday I switched this blog over to run on Jekyll. I'd been thinking about moving away from Wordpress for a while, and a short talk by Nick Quaranto at the Boston Ruby group that mentioned a Wordpress importer pushed me over the edge. So what is interesting about Jekyll?
Jekyll statically generates your site using the Liquid markup language and html/markdown/textile. No need for a database, with everything versioned as files (in git). No upgrade/backup headaches nor a need to cache anything. Trivial to set up a development version for writing and previewing site changes. I've been enamored with the idea of statically generating more and doing the rest in Javascript. So now the comments have been imported into Disqus.
There are still some rough edges, though. Enough that it likely isn't ready for the non-hacker masses just yet. The documentation could be more complete, but helped by looking at other Jekyll-based sites like Nick's for examples. The Wordpress importer didn't preserve the categories, but the permalinks worked perfectly. I've found running jekyll --server --auto lagging my edits to be a little frustrating. Still, I moved my site to Jekyll in about 2 hours without breaking a link.
Ironically, the very first iteration of my site some 10 years back when it was a "news" site (pre-"blog"-era terminology) was a folder with html "stories" that I wrote some Perl to munge with a header, footer and copy to a special directory. Before it moved on to Perl CGI based, Movable Type, Wordpress, etc. The circle is complete.