yesterday i wrote that i had moved my site to Jekyll and i also mentioned i would post how how i was doing this. Well, this is that post.

First, getting data out of Wordpress was a bit of a pain (in my case… screwing around with NGinX and PHP-FPM, but that is out of scope for this blog post… if you have a “normal” enough blog check out Jekyll Exporter (geekphotogrpaher and Tiernans Podcast both wored first time…)… If not, your on your own…

Anyway, i got a zip file out of Jekyll Exporter that included all my posts (some had to be modified…) and all my images. Styles etc, not so much… But new blog, new style! (if your on an RSS reader, check out the new site here.

So, then i installed Jekyll on my machine… Again, out of scope for this post, but the Jekyll website had details on installing and running it. I installed Sabayon Linux on my Godbox 2 a while back… more on that eventually…

so, once Jekyll was installed, i created a new site by typing

jekyll new blogname

this created a load of files under the blogname folder. I then did some tweaking… i copied all my original posts, images and pages to that folder and then ran

jekyll serve

this generates all the HTML (puts it into the _site folder in your blog directory) and then serves the html at http://127.0.0.1:4000. Hitting that page in your favourite browser then shows you how it will look.

I did some tweaks to plugins and Permalinks to get the site the way i wanted it, but once completed, i just ran

jekyll build

all my final files where then in the _site folder. I then use RSync to transfer the contents of my _site folder to the server and heay presto! its live! Well, semi live…

The main server is hosted in house, on an Ubuntu box running NGinX. But i have 3 internet connections, so i have an OVH box in France running both Varnish as a front end and HAProxy as a backend. HAProxy is pointing at the 3 WAN ips i have, and if one falls over, it take it out of the loop. Varnish then is pointing at that and doing caching… Finally, to make things even more complicated (but hopefully faster) I use Rackspace Cloud, which in turn uses Akamai as a CDN for the site…

So, there you have it. It is a lot more complicated then it needs to be. I could easily just generate the site and push to Amazon S3 and do what i am doing on tiernanotoole.ie or even easier, use Github Pages. Hell, I use GitHub to host the site (privately) already, and if i use them to host it, they would build the bloody thing too! Anyway, its working, im happy, and hopefully it means i will post more often… then again, not sure… One other thing i need to do, or at least think about doing, is to automate it… One of these days…

Either way, checkout the tiernanotoole.ie site, since there is a lot more technical stuff there, or geekphotographer which is, obviously, for geeks and photographers!

If you are looking at starting a blog using Jelyll, Check out the following links:

UPDATE 2015/08/13: This site is now hosted on a box in the house, but fronted by CloudFlare.