A New Blog for a New Year
What better way to start the new year then to rid myself of Blogger and move onto a better blogging platform? I toyed with the idea of using Azure + Wordpress but eventually settled on a platform which is much closer to my preferred way of doing things - Github pages + Jekyll. I got the idea from Buildstarted who converted his blog a while back and I was prompted into action by Phillip Haydon, who also decided that Github pages + Jekyll would server him better than Wordpress and also set about converting his blog during the Christmas period.
Here are the main selling points for me:-
- Simple authoring (offline Markdown)
- Fully version controlled (Git + Github)
- Fully customisable (I control the code!)
- Free hosting (Github)
After battling with Blogger for my previous posts (all 3 of them), creating the post you are reading now is a breeze! I’m sitting in Heathrow airport waiting for my flight and I thought I’d draft the post, so I fired up MarkdownPad and off I go!
And that is the key - simple authoring. If there’s one thing wrong with my blog currently, it’s lack of content. 3 posts in 8 months is pitiful. Often I’ve been tempted to write a quick blog post about something I’ve encountered in my coding adventures but then the thought of coercing something into existence using Blogger and the bizarre formatting and code highlighting solution which I came up with sent me into a whirlpool of procrastination which resulted in, ultimately, no blog post. I hope this has now changed.
If you are interested in adopting Github + Jekyll as your blogging platform, simply follow the instructions at GitHub. Feel free to use my blog’s source as a starting point. Just make the final result look a little different, OK? ;-)
Tweet