jekyll

Most of my blog posts are lessons learned. I’m trying to achieve something, and I document the process I used to do it. This one is one of the few where, in the end, I didn’t achieve what I wanted. In this post, I aim to explain what I learned from trying to migrate from Jekyll to Hugo, and why, in the end, I didn’t take the final step. Context I started this blog on WordPress. After several years, I decided to migrate to Jekyll. I have been happy with Jekyll so far.

At the beginning of the year, I had two new Macs in a row in one month. I changed my company and had to return my previous laptop. Thus, I ordered a replacement one, but due to the current hardware shortage, the shipping took weeks: I had to rent one in the meanwhile. It means I had to install my Jekyll stack twice in a row. The first time took quite some time; the second one was much faster.

If you like cool stories about how an engineer, faced with an impossible problem, overcame all odds and solved it, this post is not for you. This is a story of how I spent a non-trivial amount of time, how I hit a couple of walls, and how I nearly came back to square one. Why do I write it? The first reason is for me: I want to document my journey so if I ever think about trying again in the future, I’ll have some arguments against it.

I know a lot of people who have interesting things to say: when I can, I try to encourage them to write their own blogs. I think every developer who has interest should do it, with the minimal hurdle possible. However, for reasons I cannot fathom, Medium has become the blogging platform of choice. Let’s face it, while the platform is okay-ish for non-technical posts, it’s not adapted for subjects that involve code - and formatting.

A couple of years ago, I wrote how one could check the version of one’s deployed application. Recent technologies such as Spring Boot makes it even easier. It’s as important for regular applications as for static sites such as Jekyll. I wanted to have this blog display some basic Git data. As I publish from the tip of master and not from tags, the data I want is the commit hash.

When I moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll, I was faced with the problem of letting users search content in it. I didn’t give it much thought and used Google Custom Search Engine. In this post, I’d like to review possible options to search static sites, and review each of them.

Some time ago, I migrated my WordPress blog to Jekyll for different reasons including performance, security, and hosting costs - but mainly because I lost too much time maintaining the platform and the plugins up-to-date. So far, I’m very happy about the result. But I had to change the way I’m writing posts I intend to publish later. In WordPress, the process is very simple: write a draft anytime you want; edit it to your heart’s content and when ready, hit publish. Done.