--- comments_archived: true layout: post tags: - metablogging - jekyll - disqus - webdev - hosting time: 5:15 PM title: Moved to Jekyll and Disqus --- **TL;DR**: My blog is now produced by [Jekyll][], with comments hosted by [Disqus][]. [jekyll]: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll [disqus]: http://disqus.com/ This blog has transitioned between a handful of publishing platforms - including Movable Type, blosxom, and Wordpress. Well, apparently, it's that time again. I've been toying with making a change again for a few years, and finally just got all the pieces together over the past week. This blog is now just a pile of static files produced by [Jekyll][], and the comments are now hosted by [Disqus][]. [pages]: http://pages.github.com/ This has a lot of interesting implications: * I can neglect my server for long periods of time without worrying that my long-outdated copy of Wordpress has been exploited. Really, there's no reason for me to have a full-featured CMS running here. * I could host my entire blog on Amazon S3 or something similar, and be more neglectful by reducing active code even further. The only crappy thing is that I don't think I can send `decafbad.com` directly to S3, and would need to redirect to a CNAME on a subdomain on `blog.decafbad.com`. * I can edit my blog directly on GitHub and, assuming I get the webhooks set up, have my server rebuild the HTML automatically on a `git push`. I could probably use [GitHub Pages][pages] and the Jekyll support there, but I suspect I'll be doing some Weird Things that they won't handle. (And probably for good reason.) * Since Disqus has all my comments now, I can stop worrying about running that code on my server too. I'm a little antsy about putting that in the cloud, but the escape routes are well lit and I should be able to replace it easily if I need to. Self-hosted, JS-include-based comments is a project in my TODO list. * My writing here is now all stored in individual text files, formatted with Markdown, annotated with YAML metadata, and subject to revision control under git. This combination feels like it has a lot of longevity and potential for survival even beyond this current experiment with [Jekyll][] * Writing, editing, and publishing entries here can now more closely match my daily reality of living in MacVim and git. It sounds lame, but the notion of swapping over to a Wordpress admin page and working in a browser textarea has often kept me from even starting a post. But, some things are broken, now: * [Fixed][tags] No more tag pages. I don't think very many humans visit these pages, but a lot of search engines do. * [Fixed][tags] No more tag feeds. I expect to hear about this soon, since this blog gets syndicated to Planet Mozilla via my "mozilla" tag feed. * No more year / month archive pages or sidebar widget. Not sure how many people actually stroll down memory lane here on my blog, but I do have a [gigantor huge list of all my posts evar][archives], now. * A general lack of contextual links to related posts and such. Turns out that running the LSI option on Jekyll is completely horrible. * Regeneration seems less-than-happy in general, and I wish it did conditional regneration. That is, only produce the HTML for things that need it because dependencies have changed. No need to rebake the whole world just because I changed one file. [tags]: https://github.com/lmorchard/blog.decafbad.com/commit/a79678828ab612c2edb8a8ac3f796199cb922a2e The bright side is that there are solutions to all the broken things, and now I have something to tinker with again on my blog. So, let me know if anything else looks broken, and hopefully this will get me spewing some more words out onto this thing soon. [archives]: http://decafbad.com/blog/archives

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