Switching from WordPress to nanoc, jumping in feet first
April 2, 2013, [MD]
I've thought about switching to a static site generator for a while, spending some time playing with Jekyll, the poster-boy for SSGs, and learning about the different options, but I always put it on the backburner.
There are many reasons for switching, and for doing it now. My current blog layout has been the same since 2005, and although I've enjoyed it, it's starting to feel old. I've also spent a lot of time writing on my wiki, which runs on localhost and is synced online, with a number of neat tools to help me author more effectively, and these days I find it so much quicker to write something on my wiki, than on my blog.
I don't know if I've really been writing less on my blog lately, or if it just feels like it - it's always been up and down. In the graph below, each point represents a blog post, the y-axis shows length (log-scale), and the x-axis time. You can see some pretty big gaps where I didn't write anything (like in 2007). I also seem to write fewer very short blog posts, which is probably because I began using Twitter and later Google Plus for quick links, and used the blog more for longer texts.
(the graph above was generated with R and knitr, which is another reason why I'd like to switch to an SSG, however I haven't quite integrated knitr into my workflow yet).
Recently, I found my PhD wiki overrun with spam accounts. Because the canonical version is stored offline, I was able to simply do another sync, and the wiki looked just as nice. I've also had WordPress hacked two or three times, and it was not so easy - once I lost all my posts, and had to recover them using Google Cache. Knowing that I have my entire post history on my harddrive, in "future-proof" Markdown, is a great feeling.
Nanoc is written in Ruby, and makes it very easy to configure, design compilation rules and filters (like plugins in WordPress), etc. Out of the box, it requires a fair amount of setup, but I've used my previous WordPress setup in almost 9 years, so spending a day or two to get it right will hopefully be worth it. I had a look at a nanoc blog skeleton, but not only did it need tweaking to work properly with the latest version of nanoc, there was also too much magic going on. In the end, Dave Clark's guide to building a blog with nanoc got me started, and by making all the changes myself, I understood much better how the system is working.
The transition is not by any means "finished", there are many older blog posts that need cleaning up, the layout (based on Mark Reid's site) is nice, but needs polishing, etc. But I decided to eat my own dogfood and put it up. Already most posts should work, on the same URLs, and I'll slowly fix the rest.
PS: I used linkify extensively for this blog post, and I love it
Stian Håklev April 2, 2013 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus