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going static

Seems like it is a New Year tradition that I move my blog to a new format.

Last year I moved from Ghost to markdown and WordPress, this meant my site was a little easier to manage but also a lot slower.

Over 2017 I got to use jekyll on a couple of sites (mainly https://2018.frontendne.co.uk/) it seemed like a good fit to move to as my content was already in markdown.

The other question was where to host it? I decided to use github pages with cloudflare.

I also figured since I was moving it - I would update it slightly with a few design tweaks and a serviceWorker for offline support.

Jekyll

Jekyll is really nice to work with - it has nice templating liquid and has built in support for compiling Sass files.

Converting from a WordPress theme didn’t take too long - most of my original template was split into functions, so it was easy to move them to _includes.

If you’ve never used it before, you can check out my template over on github.

GitHub pages and hosting

I largely followed this guide on deploying the site - it worked without too many issues. The next step was to add some https.

Orginally I was using Let’s Encrypt, but with this being a hosted site this wasn’t an option.

I decided to use cloud flare, this gives some addtional options in terms of caching.

I’d mostly followed this guide on cloud flare, the only difference was I used a CNAME to htmlandbacon.github.io to serve my site.

upgrades

This gave me the chance to do some care to my site including

It also makes it a little easier to single page groupings of content and publishing a little easier.