Earlier this year, I jumped ship on WordPress and moved to Jekyll after reading this post on Hacker News. I wanted to be 1337! I wanted to ditch the whale that was WordPress.
Well, it was quite a run, but in the end I decided to revert back to WordPress. Although Jekyll is much faster than WordPress, here were my issues:
Build Times
As my post count grew, so did the time to compile my jekyll site. Jekyll is a static site builder, so naturally it has to rebuild your site any time anything changes. With my blog containing hundreds of posts, my site build times started getting into minutes. I simply don’t want to wait forever to publish a post.
Since it took so long to build my site, it discouraged me from posting. I would only write posts on my specified #iDevBlogADay days, rather than just posting quick info posts.
Too Many Dependancies
Jekyll is a beast to install, especially if you want to support some of the fancier plugins like syntax highlighting. This limited my blogging to only my machines. I couldn’t blog from anywhere anymore. I could have installed Jekyll on my server, but that just seems like a hassle, also see my first point about build times.
No Mobile App
I like to blog on the go, and with Jekyll I just couldn’t find an elegant solution to blog from my iPhone or iPad. I found myself trying to come up with hackish solutions and write custom scripps, but in the end it just wasn’t worth it.
I can now use Markdown with WordPress
I fell in love with Jekyll because I could write in markdown. With this plugin, I can now do just that with WordPress. It stores the Markdown in a separate meta field and generates the post_content html upon publishing the post. So, I’m not married to the plugin in case I decide to ditch it.
I have also hid the disgusting “Visual Editor” that WordPress is unfortunate enough to ship with. This makes my writing experience much more pleasant.
The Future
While Jekyll was a fun experiment, I think I will stick with WordPress for now.
geekCred–;
