Goodbye WordPress, Hello Jekyll

I am happy to announce I’ve recently ported my blog from WordPress to Jekyll-based GitHub Pages. I’ve been a long time user of WordPress blog, hosted on a private web server from GoDaddy. About a month ago, I got a notification from GoDaddy saying they are retiring the web server I’ve been using for the past 6 years. They offered me the option to move all my contents to a new premium web server for free, but not for long. They said I would be automatically billed for this premium web hosting service after the first year.

WordPress is great and served me well, but I’ve also had many issues including:

• It updates quite frequently and everytime it does, it tends to break one or two plugins.
• It was quite slow. It got slower and slower over time.
• Not free if you want to customize, requires a web server.

Then I found out you can host a blog directly from your GitHub repository.

GitHub is a great alternative because:

• It costs you nothing to maintain.
• Your blog is automatically version-controlled.
• The page loads and responds very fast.
• The server is very reliable.

I have to confess I knew nothing about Jekyll a month ago (not known it existed), but apparantly, in short, it allows you to create a blog on GitHub. It is a ruby-based engine behind GitHub Pages that handles generating static HTML pages from Markdown (*.md) and it’s easy and great to work with.

So far, so good. Old WordPress site will still be available through wp.hoondy.com.

-Hoondy