Hello Jekyll 31 August 2013
It’s been over four years since I’ve made any major change to my website. The last time was when I’d upgraded from Drupal 5 to 6. I built a custom theme using the—then state of the art—960 Grid System and some CSS to give the typography some nice vertical rhythm. I’d considered trying to upgrade to Drupal 7 a few times but just couldn’t muster the energy. I’ve been doing less and less with Drupal over the last two years so switching to something that’s not reliant on a database was appealing.
I’d been watching Aki Braun use Jekyll to redo Recurly’s marketing site and it seemed really neat. So I decided to take the plunge and spent a little time with Jekyll Import’s Drupal migrator to start getting my blog posts moved over. Zac Halbert pointed me towards Foundation 4 which turned out to be a great starting point for a responsive grid and nice typography.
The biggest chunk of time turned out to be sorting and cleaning out all the old blog posts. I converted them from HTML to markdown and tried to fix the obvious spelling and grammar problems. I also realized I had some interesting projects that had been mentioned in blog posts but weren’t easy to find. I’ve started trying to explicitly document those in the projects section.
Going through 6+ years of posts (the 6 years prior to that were never migrated from Blogger and MovableType) I realized how much less I write these days. When I do write it’s primarily to announce major life event (still haven’t had a we had a baby blog post…) or discuss a professional topic. So a big part of the cleanup was removing some of the posts I wouldn’t write about these days. Now there’s not much to read about about ex-girlfriends or politics but they’re still in the wayback machine if I ever feel like reminiscing.
I’m amused to realize how the site has come full circle. I’d started out hand editing text files, moved that to a “CMS” I wrote in ASP.net or PHP (I really can’t remember which), then over to Blogger, then Movable Type and finally Drupal. So now finding myself editing text files and pushing those to a static site generator, it just seems fitting. It’s really hard to beat plain text from a longevity stand point.