Goodbye Wordpress

For the past 6 years this blog has been running off the same Wordpress install on a 1&1 shared hosting account without interruption. It was a good run, and speaks to how well Wordpress upgrades work.

But a Wordpress install is just so uncool. I decided to hop on the Jeykll train. This blog is now 100% static, which is pretty refreshing after years of dealing a massive PHP application. It doesn’t even require a database and it allows me to tweak to my heart’s content. Wordpress always seemed like a bit of a black box. Sure, the code was there, but it was daunting to even think about touching it.

Certain things become more complicated with Jekyll, since by default pretty much everything is done manaully. The most trivial being just creatig a post. Manually you will have to create the file, name it correctly, and then upload images, and link to them. Not a great workflow if you just want to write a quick post. So I created a rakefile that takes care of some of these tasks for me. The real timesaver is creating a folder in _images/ for each post, and then syncing them with s3 with the s3sync task:

desc 'create new post. args: title, category'
# rake new title="New post title goes here" category="category"
task :new do
  require 'rubygems'
  title = ENV["title"] || "New Title"
  category = ENV["category"] || "other"
  slug = title.gsub(' ','-').downcase

  TARGET_DIR = "_posts"

  filename = "#{Time.new.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}-#{slug}.markdown"
  image_dir ="_images/#{Time.new.strftime('%Y-%m')}-#{slug}"
  path = File.join(TARGET_DIR, filename)
  post = <<-HTML
  ---
  layout: post
  title: TITLE
  date: DATE
  categories: CATEGORY
  ---
  <!--- {{site.image_url}}/{{page.id | replace: '/','-' | remove_first: '-'}}/image.jpg -->

  HTML
  post.gsub!('TITLE', title).gsub!('DATE', Time.new.to_s).gsub!('CATEGORY', category)
  File.open(path, 'w') do |file|
    file.puts post
  end
  puts "new post generated in #{path}"
  system "mkdir #{image_dir}"
  system "geany #{path}"
end

task :s3sync do
  system "s3cmd sync _images/ s3://pedaldp/images/ -P"
end

This post was written in a text editor. It will be published to my vps with a git push deploy master. Cool.