Jekyll is so much better than Drupal and Wordpress

Jekyll is so much better than Drupal and Wordpress

I migrated my website to a static site generator. Let me tell you why.

My first blog was in 1997 and I used static html. The problem with that is look-and-feel is difficult to update across possibly hundreds of html files. In 2001 I moved to Sharepoint. Sharepoint is a really heavyweight solution. I really wanted to just write dlcontent without having to deal with the intricacies of html that distract a writer from getting “thoughts to paper”.

So I moved to Drupal in 2008…Wordpress was not yet the clear winner in website/blog platforms back then. While Drupal is decent and has met my needs for 10 years, it’s a bit of a nightmare to use:

  • I use a wysiwyg editor and markdown with Drupal, the underlying content is saved to the database (mysql) as html with mixed content and formatting. Ugh.
  • Drupal has had some serious security vulnerabilities. I have a blog, I’m not conducting e-commerce. Why must I run a full-blown Apache server and mysql to generate what is essentially static content?
  • To make Drupal perform you really need a caching engine…which flies in the face of a dynamic website that runs out of database…right?
  • Drupal is based on php. Must I say more.

Nobody knows PHP, everybody just lies and claims they don’t.

–dave

  • Upgrading Drupal is not easy
  • Did I already mention the security vulnerabilities? I did? Let me mention it AGAIN

Eating My Own Dogfood

For years I’ve been preaching “Public Cloud” to clients. There are some key tenants to cloud architecture including understanding when to use static content, when a database is a poor solution, and when data should be cached and how to do it.

Perhaps it’s time I moved my blog to something more “modern”. Wordpress (wp) is frankly only a bit better than Drupal. But what I really need is a static site generator that generates html files that can be hosted. Any content that is in fact dynamic can be handled with an Azure Function or a service like Disqus, shopify, mailchimp, etc. Why would anyone want to host their own commenting engine in 2018?

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is a static site generator based on Ruby (you don’t need to know ANY Ruby) that takes md files and builds a static site using gitlab/github using bootstrap and the Liquid theming engine. Totally customizable.

dl

Jekyll is a modern platform. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted.

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