I may be a bit late to the Jekyll party, but with Posterous being acquired by twitter a few months ago, I figured why not try it out. Two weekends later I’ve migrated enough that I’m comfortable shipping, though I imagine a bunch of silly bugs will remain. Please email me with any issues you find, and I’ll get to them when I can.
In the meantime…
Moving from Posterous to Jekyll: What you need to know.
- Jekyll is a static site generator created by GitHub for GitHub Pages. It is rather extensible, so people have built things like Jekyll-Bootstrap and Octopress on top of it. I sort of half-used the former (adapted a theme) and didn’t know about the latter until it was too late. Maybe/probably use Octopress if you go this route.
- Migrating from Posterous kinda-sorta works. The migrator that includes images/permalinks is on github here. Some ruby required. Here’s my hacky version, with a couple of updates.
- Comments I haven’t moved mine yet but a guide to move posterous comments to disqus is available. The decision to have comments (even moderated ones) is not one I’ve made yet. We’ll see.
- RSS Here’s the jekyll+feedburner guide
- Developing Locally I used guard to auto re-generate pages as I was iterating on the CSS hackery. Pretty useful, especially if you’re already reasonably comfortable with guard.
- Hosting GitHub Pages will host for you at yourusername.github.com + let you host on your domain if you add a CNAME to your distribution. I’m about to try it. Fingers crossed. Also, I don’t know how much I trust GitHub to be so generous in the long run, but my next migration is going to be far less painful - “it’s just static content”. Note: I was worried about where to stick draft posts, since the repo needs to be public, and my solution was to have both a public and a private repository, so releasing is “git commit -a && git push public master.”
- Markdown I admit I’m not too experienced with Markdown. Here’s my cheatsheet.
Tags: #technical #writing