posted by delano

I started this blog in September 2008 with a post about encryption in Ruby. I used Tumblr because I wanted something quick and simple. As it turned out, Tumblr is a great service for personal blogs but not for group and company blogs. Adding multiple users to a single blog with Tumblr is strange. Every user must have their own personal blog before they can be added to the group blog. I also wanted more control over the layout and content.

In December I switched to WordPress. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience. I could do almost everything I wanted to do with the layout and I brought the content home to our own servers. But something still did not feel right. I don’t particularly like databases at the best of times and using one for a blog is more than a bit excessive. There’s a lot of overhead involved in running a WordPress blog (the same thing can be said about any blog engine that combines an application with a database). There’s the system administration to keep it up to date, secure, and performing well. There are more steps than necessary to write new posts. It’s slow. That’s a lot of cake!

So what’s the solution? Jekyll, a blog-aware, static site generator. What’s old is new again. I’ve been using Jekyll for solutious.com for about a month and I’m loving it. Unlike databases, I love files regardless of the times so using a static site is right up my alley. And now I’m using it for the blog too. There’s a lot of positive and helpful stuff written about it already so I won’t re-iterate that here. But I will mention that Jekyll also plays nice with GitHub (which is logical since it’s written by Tom Preston-Werner).

I’ll also mention that I like the name. Thanks TPW!