About this mess (2022)

Here we go again

Every so many years I look at my blog or personal website and get that urge to tinker with it and try something new. And that time was recently, as I've moved my blog from Svbtle to Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages. It all started when I tried to update Svbtle to use the newer Google Analytics setup, but found it was not supported. From that problem, I got squirreled and ended up moving to a new blog host.

Why Jekyll?

Jekyll may not be the hot new thing, and as I get older—I mean more experienced—I realize that the latest thing isn't always best in the long term. Instead of basing things on a technology, I'm basing them on a format: Markdown.

Svbtle already used Markdown, so that part was (mostly) painless. I did end up using svbtle-jekyll, a small Python tool that extracts Svbtle posts and puts them in Jeykll format (from what I can tell is kramdown + a header). svbtle-jekyll required a few tweaks to get it to read the HTML correctly (it is 7 years old—it almost worked out-of-the-box!)

Now that my blog posts are in Markdown and stored in a git repo I own, it should be easy to move them elsewhere if—and when—I decide to move to a new platform.

Jekyll also made it easy to keep the same URLs for my posts so I don't have to mess with HTTP 301 redirects.

Theming

In looking for Jekyll themes, I quickly found Minimal Mistakes, which is a very popular—if not most popular—theme for Jekyll. Once I made it through setup and dependencies, I was off and running. So now I am running on a static website that is free to host and doesn't look half bad.

What's next?

Am I going to (re)commit to blogging more? No, but I'll try. At a minimum something new will come along in a few years and I may be tempted to switch to that. 😉