grack.com

I’m now on my fifth – though I’m sure not my last – iteration of blog management, Jekyll. It’s a slick static site generator and from what I can tell, the most popular.

One of the benefits of a static site generation tool is that you can aggressively cache the content. For that I’ve thrown Cloudflare in front of everything and have it both caching and optimizing all of my assets.

As part of the re-launch I wanted to offer some basic site search. I looked into a few options for static search in pure Javascript, but the most convenient turned out to be Swiftype which was not much more work than clicking a switch on Cloudflare’s app page.

While I was somewhat happy on Wordpress, my biggest issue with it was that everything lived in a database rather than source control, and that it required constant attention updating it for each release. I spent nearly five years on the platform, however, which puts it at the longest I’ve stayed on any one tool.

Obviously, publishing posts with static site generators isn’t quite as convenient. For that I’m making use of Travis CI and a private GitHub repo. It runs linklint over everything, then pushes it out to the static host via rsync.