Moving Away From A Dynamic To A Static Site

A while ago I started a blog using a popular and powerful hosted service. I used this not because I wasn’t able to install and configure or even write my own, but because it was easier and I don’t have much passion for the technology behind my blog. It is hard to have passion when your posting maybe once or twice a month, but things change.

I started using Jekyll for Zeke’s portfolio site which lead me down a deep rabbit hole. I had his site up and running in three hours, in this time I picked the style, doctored up some photos and learned Jekyll. My site is a tad more complicated, but I had my portfolio converted to use Jekyll in two evenings whilst watching Torchwood. The interesting bits are some custom code to generate the album pages and load the page using javascript. On github

This out of the way it was time to start looking at my neglected blog; sadly the service I used didn’t support exporting of content, so I went through hand picked the entries I wanted to keep and stored them in Dropbox as my favorite file format, markdown. I installed Dropbox on my server and used incron to monitor the Dropbox directory and run a Jekyll rebuild script. Douplicating this functionality for dropping in new images to my gallery was quick and easy. Now to publish a blog post or push a new image in to a gallery, I save a file in a Dropbox folder and BAM! There is even a jQuery plugin to pull all your Picasa galleries in to your page using javascript, PWI.

Benefits:

• I own the content, no more having to worry if the service I’m using can export
• Publishing is even easier then on the hosted service and it can even easily be done using any device with access to Dropbox
• It is all static content, no server side scripts required to serve pages, scaling is easy-peasy

Disadvantages:

• The uptime responsability falls on me
• Current setup doesn’t support any server side script, you can add some by plugging in a Sinatra server