Moving my Blog from Wordpress to Jekyll Bootstrap

Rationale

I found the following points attractive which made me think about migrating to Jekyll:

• git workflow for editing
• less infrastructure (no DB, no PHP)
• ability to serve from any static webspace, including Amazon S3
• control over plugins

Starting point

My existing Blog does not have so many posts, migration of content is not a big issue, and not a critical item (even if I would loose old content)

However the stats section of wordpress.com is nice - but this can be easily replaced with Google Analytics.

Setup

Here are the steps:

• get a github account
• follow the quick setup from here, it claims “from 0 to blog in 3 minutes”, but this is slightly optimistic. The time for github to do the first publish on a new blog is already more than 3 minutes.
• but then there were a few things not working…
  • I installed the following prerequisities to make sure to be up to date with all the components used by github: Installation Instructions from GitHub
  • the default markdown renderer is Kramdown, but I found that it did not render the fenced code blocks (i.e. triple backquotes) correctly, so I changed it to redcarpet. Just a one line in the _config.yml which reads:

markdown: redcarpet

• then of course I wanted a nicer, cleaner, more minimal theme and settled for the theme Tom and installed it with this command

$ rake theme:install git="https://github.com/jekyllbootstrap/theme-tom.git"

Migrating old content

I started this migration manually with one of my latest posts from here to here just to get some experience how to handle the different formatting, the included image assets, etc.

Later I plan to look at migration tools. (Edit: I looked at this and decided, with the small number of exiting posts, that a manual “copy & paste” migration is sufficient in my case)

Themes

I will probably sooner or later fork the theme Tom to make some changes - but first I want to get the basics up and running.

Conclusion

The steps above were done in a pretty short time (a few hours over one weekend) and got a basic blog running with no Wordpress, no MySQL, no PHP, just static content.

Fast, secure and slick.