The Theo Spears Blog

Today I've been fighting against Jekyll. It's a blogging engine written by the team at Github to help with managing blogs stored in Git. Or perhaps it's more accurate to describe it as a Domain Specific Language for writing blogging engines. It's very powerful, but you have to do a fair bit of work yourself to get it up and running.

Obvious question time. Why on earth am I fighting with an obscure and unsupported blogging engine, rather than just installing Wordpress and calling it done? As always, there is more than one reason: 1. I didn't realise just how hard it would be. 2. I believe that blog posts are part of a site's content, and therefore things that are important to all my other site content are also important for it. Blog posts need to be stored in version control so I can back out and stupid changes. They need to be backed up in case my computer or server blow up. I want to be able to edit them offline, and using my favourite editor (vim). I already have all this in place for the rest of the site in a git repository. Setting up wordpress means suddenly I've got a second interface to use, a second database to backup, and a second system to migrate if I ever move the site onto a different machine.

So it's a complexity tradeoff again. I am doing some more work now in order to have a simpler and easier to administer system in the future. But still, an entire day to get a blog setup and live. That's just pathetic.