Hello Jekyll, Goodbye Wordpress

So my Wordpress site got hacked rather badly recently and 000webhost canceled my free hosting:

Site Down

Realising the amount of effort I put into writing templates, uploading huge amounts of files and using crappy FTP connections, I looked for a better way to post stuff.

Jekyll is a static website generator written in Ruby, is very light and didn’t take nearly as much time to install, even though I had to set up DNS records again.

  1. Take a look at the source branch of this website.

  2. Fork the repo and checkout both the source and master branches.

  3. Make some changes to the site in the source branch and push them.

  4. Run publish.sh, which will build the site in the master branch and push it.

If you’re hosting a Project Page instead of a User Page, you need to push to a gh-pages branch instead, so edit publish.sh to your needs. See the GitHub Pages guide.

This has some setbacks – even though I installed the Wordpress importer like so:

sudo gem install jekyll-import --pre

And followed their importing guide, my old posts are more or less broken. But I think cleaning them up will be a more long term solution, and I don’t need a PHP server anymore :)

I plan to port Crayon eventually, but that’s another story.