24 May 2015

Migrating from Wordpress to Github Pages

This blog was recently running on a self-hosted Wordpress site and found myself dispirited by the user experience of Wordpress. For all its flexibilty and functionality I would find myself shying away from blogging for the following reasons:

• The tools for writing and editing posts - although always improving - compare poorly to my favourite text editor(s),
• Maintaining security updates and plugins is such a constant frustration,
• All those posts aren’t in any form of source control but instead a MySQL database that needs a backup strategy,
• Wordpress was missing the fun factor.

After looking around at several options I decided on using Github Pages with Jekyll. This option was going to help on all of these points. I can use my favourite text editor(s) with Markdown, no more reminders for security updates, git replaces the DB, and the fun factor is back. Yay :)

Here’s my notes to getting started with Jekyll and Github pages.

Setting up Jekyll on OS X Yosemite

First up let’s setup OS X Yosemite so that we can get Jekyll running. To do this we’ll need to install a few components so that we can compile the dependancies. Open a terminal window and execute:

xcode-select -install

Note: I’m using the verion of Ruby that ships with Yosemite and won’t cover using Homebrew or RVM etc.

Install Jekyll by using a terminal window again to execute the command:

sudo gem install jekyll

Recommended reading

Setup a Github Page

1. Follow the guide from Github, it’s really easy to follow along.
2. Don’t forget to add a .gitignore like this otherwise you’ll accidently commit the _site directory.

Pick a theme

1. Search around for Jekyll themes. For this blog I settled on https://github.com/muan/scribble,
2. Fork or add it to your Github page repo.

Start posting

1. Create a _posts directory in the repo,
2. Adding a file like YYYY-MM-DD-this-is-my-post-title.md into _posts,
3. Ensure that the Front Matter header is at the top of the post http://jekyllrb.com/docs/frontmatter/,
4. For more info read along with the Jekyll docs.

Setting the DNS for GitHub Pages on Namecheap

To complete the migration I followed these articles to configure github with a custom URL:

1. http://davidensinger.com/2013/03/setting-the-dns-for-github-pages-on-namecheap/ and
2. https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/

Good luck and have fun. :)

Til next time,
Ben at 15:41