The blog has now officially moved (hopefully for the last time) from the current host, Tumblr, to the home hosted on Github Pages via Jekyll. I have been admiring static site generators for what seems like forever though I was always frankly intimidated by the process. However, for my birthday this year, I took a day and decided to dig into Jekyll, Homebrew, and Ruby Gems1. I spent the day installing and working my way through different tutorials. I had only heard of Homebrew and Ruby at that point and I wouldn’t say I am much better now though I am more familiar with the Mac Terminal app.

I then had the pleasure of trying to port over all my prior posts from Blogger and Tumblr2, which I thought would be a manual process though the community has built several import tools that work for a variety of different services. The pages get imported just fine (albeit in HTML rather than Markdown), and they look fully integrated with the blog.

I do still have some issues with deadlinks though that is an issue on any website (large or small). I have found that I enjoy the service so far. It is more nuanced/fiddly to set up though it meets my needs, and I now have a text file for EVERY one of my posts going back to 2008 so that is rather amazing considering everything. I am no longer locked into a single service.

Here are some tutorial videos that I found helpful in working through Jekyll:

I still need to go through and update some links though I am pleased with how it all turned out. I also really appreciate being able to host the site on GitHub Pages.. The service sits atop the Github repository model so you only need to set up a repo, and then you can push commits to set up or update your site3.

  1. It was a fun birthday in its way though not one I would have imagined myself taking a decade ago. ↩

  2. I had never even completed the port from Blogger to Tumblr when I moved more fully to that service sometime in 2019. ↩

  3. The system also has a great help site, which always makes me like a service more. ↩