I haven’t contributed new content to this site in quite some time. At this point, it’s just a landing / support page for my iPhone apps. I have interesting thoughts that I want to share, but updating on Wordpress has been too cumbersome and uninteresting to me.
Up until yesterday, this blog was hosted on Fastdomain with Wordpress. I knew I was doing a disservice to myself by using Wordpress — I’m a curious Engineer, I can do better! Fastdomain was costing me > 100$/yr just to host the site. They billed me annually in December – and for the past two years when I got the Fastdomain bill in email, the easiest path was to pay it and remain in my Wordpress jail.
Fortunately, I got inspired a few months ahead of the deadline this year and took action. I wanted to change my site and had several key criteria for the change in mind. I wanted to build a site that:
After some basic searching, I came across Jekyll. It appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. To satisfy my ‘Free’ criteria, I planned to run it on Heroku, which I’ve been using a lot lately with great success. To store my code, I planned to use my existing Bitbucket account, which is also free. Here are the basic steps I followed, hopefully with enough detail to help you get a site off the ground as well:
There should be plenty of resources out there to help you with this already so I wont go into any more detail.
I followed the prerequisite instructions from this great Jekyll on Heroku tutorial. I did not clone the Jekyll bootstrap project though, since I did not want to use Bootstrap.
The hardest part for me was getting some design momentum. I’m a design newbie, so I scrolled through the Jekyll site examples page. I wanted a minimalist site, and I drew inspiration from Tom Preston-Werner’s site and Zach Holman’s site. I ended up pulling down Tom’s site as a baseline for mine (license indicated this was fine, but if this is some secret designer code of ethics violation let me know!).
I hacked through the CSS and tried to give it a bit of my own touch — you should do the same if you decide to go this route. I’m sure the CSS I added is not great and the design isn’t anything special, but I’m looking forward to learning more and getting better.
I jumped back to the Jekyll on Heroku tutorial and followed the ‘Prepare Jekyll for Heroku’ section. It’s pretty straightforward. I had only deployed Python code to Heroku before and the differences are minor.
There are some good tools to help you with this. I ended up using Jekyll + Wordpress export file.
You may want to clean up the generated html for the migrated posts. Mine were pretty nasty and I ended up converting them all to markdown while cleaning them up.
You can reference the Jekyll on Heroku tutorial again (‘On to Heroku’ section). Now, you have a live site!
I also did the following things which may interest you:
Heroku is an amazing way to get things up and running quickly. I’ve been using it lately to develop and prototype new applications in Python / Django, and it’s been great fun.
A few notes on the Free aspect:
This has been a fun project for me and I was able to work with a few new great tools along the way. I highly recommend the Jekyll / Heroku route if you want to keep a simple site but do not want Wordpress. I’m glad to have a new site that I wont dread updating — Here’s to hoping it doesn’t stay stagnant for an extended period of time again!