(I would like to apologize for blasting all my RSS readers with EVERY SINGLE POST on this blog when I set things up. The new template for the feed is different and I guess it forced changes on everyone. I didn't intend to do it that way, and I'm sorry for any problems it causes my readers)

I've been using WordPress for a long time. It's served up 5+ years of blog content with very few problems. But with each release of WordPress, I find myself asking the question "is it worth dragging all this extra functionality around with me?" I've come to the conclusion that the answer is no.

Code generation is a programming technique that I think is both unappreciated and under-utilized by programmers. Naturally, when I started looking into turning my blog into static pages (I feel like it's a really good fit for what I'm doing) I looked at solutions in both Python and Ruby. In the end, I settled on Jekyll.

Then I headed to my favourite search engine and looked for examples of how to convert a WordPress blog into a Jekyll blog. I ended up finding this awesome blog post by Paul Stamatiou that provided me with pretty much all the information I needed. His "here's all the things I wanted to do and how I achieved them" worked out really well for me. I even used his own fork of Jekyll to build the new version of this blog. If you follow his instructions and advice, I don't think you can go wrong.

Not everything went 100% smoothly of course. I had to tweak things because I was running my blog out of a subdirectory instead of out of the root. That meant I had to pay attention to the value for base_url in the Jekyll configuration file, and I also had to be careful of what I put in my Nginx configuration.

The big changes were to the WordPress migration tool that was provided. I hacked it to automatically add a header to the post and to also play with the YAML Front Matter details inside each post. I had decided to use Disqus for my comments and it took me a while to figure out how to provide the proper reference values for the Disqus javascript to find the comments since they had originally been imported via a WordPress plugin.

I also had to deal with needing to change how syntax highlighting worked. I had been using a plugin that supported GeSHi but Jekyll has support out-of-the box for using Pygments, a Python-based syntax highlighter. Armed with a little Perl one-liner skills I quickly search-and-replaced all the old syntax highlighting tags with the new pairs that I needed.

Now, my blog sits on my laptop and I edit the posts in Vim. When I'm ready to check things out, I get jekyll to generate the blog pages for me and I check them out using the local development server. When I'm happy, I then fire up the deploy shell script that I use (which runs jekuyll and then uses rsync to push the files up to my blog) and BOOM I'm done.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any weirdness with the blog and I hope to make some subtle changes going forward. Doing it as a static site means I can experiment with the layout from time-to-time like PeepCode has done. It's always good to learn new skills, and now I can add "static page generation" to the toolkit.