It is time to switch website platforms, so I’m saying, Goodby Wordpress and Hello to Jekyll.

wordpress to jekyll

Blogging, writing, sharing. I’ve been doing that on the inter-webs for far too long.

How long? See if these terms bring back memories, or generate a blank slate…

Can you remember gopher, or Mosaic? They were the internet of the early 1990s.

Over time I’ve used far too many different forms to share ideas and content. For many years I’ve used Wordpress as my content management system for a number of different sites.

Wordpress has served me well, but something had to change.

Why say Goodbye Wordpress

If Wordpress worked so well, why switch? Why say Goodbye Wordpress?

Basically I have a number of reasons:

  • I was bored.
  • My small sites weren’t as fast as they should be.
  • Spammers made comments … frustrating and time-consuming.
  • Guest authors somehow turned into the new spammers.
  • The overhead of maintaining multiple Wordpress blogs was too much.

boredom - some may call it technology-based ADHD. But there is part of me that is driven by exploring new technologies; new programming languages, and new platforms.

Wordpress had become boring to me. I didn’t like logging in to write. So I didn’t.

My sites became stale, my desire for writing, creating, and curating content had all but disappeared.

At the core that change was driven by boredom.

Watch for more posts in the future about my creative process. It has taken years to find tools and methods to help me manage a wide array of interests and shape those interests into an actionable plan for creating things.

My sites are small niche focused blogs. Most are written and maintained solely by myself. I rarely accept guest posts, so multi-authoring wasn’t really all that important.

There came a point where I admitted that I just don’t need the bulk of the capabilities that come with Wordpress. I needed something smaller; something simpler.

Markdown

I’ve been searching for simple ways to help me capture and share thoughts for years. One thing that kept getting me caught in the weeds was formatting.

I’d spend more time trying to determine the right format for an idea instead of getting the idea out of my head.

Since I’m a tech-geek from the 1990s I’ve been thinking and writing in HTML or another form of SGML for … decades.

So when I heard about markdown I was intrigued.

Markdown is a simplified markup language. At least that’s a greatly simplified explanation.

I’ve been using it for notes, projects, and even books. Markdown has become my go to format for capturing ideas.

What if I could have my blog platform based on Markdown?

Meet Jekyll

Jekyll is a ruby-based content generation platform that uses Markdown.

Fast forward past my geeky adventure.

I now have a platform that is:

To export my Wordpress content I started with exitwp. It took some time but eventually I was able to export three different sites, have exitwp reformat and convert the content to Jekyll structure.

So Now I have a new platform

So most of my sites have been converted over. Check them out:

Let the content creation begin.