From melabit to melabit: why Jekyll?

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 18:00:00 +0000

– Source: Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash.

As I mentioned in my last post, leaving the WordPress comfort zone wasn’t easy at all.

Going from focusing solely on writing something interesting – while a team of system administrators and web programming experts handled everything else – to having to do it all by myself was a massive leap.

It took quite some time to set up the new system, add missing features, and resolve the (many) unexpected technical issues. And let’s not forget that, in the meantime, I was still managing my regular work and trying to write a post now and then.

Thus, the primary need was to base this new blog on a stable and reliable platform, a platform that wouldn’t change every week or, worse, suddenly vanish because its developer got tired of tinkering with the project.

Having abundant, well-written documentation was also essential: clear guides for configuring the system and finding quick solutions to problems (which are inevitable) are a tremendous help, saving countless hours of frustration.

With these criteria, the choice was inevitable, and it was the same as many years ago: Jekyll.

Because Jekyll may have its flaws, such as the slow site generation and the bulkiness of the generated code, but it’s been around for 16 years. It continues to be regularly developed without dramatic overhauls (the latest release was in September 2024), and you can find guides online for virtually anything you might encounter when building a site with this platform.

After all, it’s no coincidence that GitHub chose Jekyll as the platform for generating sites directly from its repositories.

Back then, I was so convinced about Jekyll that I wrote all 482 posts of the blog on wordpress.com in Markdown, with a YAML front matter like the one used by Jekyll and saved images in folders named after the posts.

On WordPress, this wasn’t necessary because all I had to (and could) do was copy the text into a new post, add the images, and click publish (well, it’s a bit more complicated, but you get the idea).

However, having everything neatly prepared in the right_ format significantly simplified the transition from WordPress to a static site based on Jekyll. I just had to set up the basic structure, add the posts and images, and generate the site to have everything ready to go (again, it’s slightly more complex than that, but you get the idea).

If I hadn’t kept the original texts, I could have used a WordPress plugin to export the posts from WordPress to Jekyll. (It’s true, there’s a WordPress plugin for almost everything!) But the plugin doesn’t support comments, images are dumped into a non-standard directory and need to be moved, and all links have to be fixed… Ultimately, in my case, it would have taken more time to clean everything up than to start from scratch.

Now the foundational work is done, and all the main functions of the new site are more or less working. At this point, it’s easier to explore alternative—and hopefully more performant—solutions to Jekyll.

At the top of my list are Bridgetown, a Jekyll fork_ worth diving into, and Middleman, which intrigues me even if I’m not entirely sure why!

It will be fun.

From melabit to melabit: goodbye WordPress, hello Jekyll

Thu, 02 Jan 2025 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by the Microsoft Designer AI.

Eleven years ago, when I started writing in this personal space, I never imagined I would stick with WordPress.com for so long. WordPress.com is a convenient and reliable blogging platform, but it has always been ill-suited to my way of working. Over time, I learned to live with these limitations, but the idea of changing platforms never left my mind.

From the start, I had a clear idea of which alternative platform I wanted to use. A few years later, I revisited the available options and detailed the steps to transition in a long series of posts. Ultimately, though, I didn’t follow through, perhaps because I wasn’t fully convinced about the decision.

After all, leaving the comfort zone of a platform that has caused you zero problems over the years to embark on a new journey where you manage everything yourself is no small task.

A few months ago, however, Automattic, the company behind the open-source WordPress software and its related products, decided to share by default all content hosted on WordPress.com with “third parties.” Actually, this means sharing it with AI-powered text generators (think ChatGPT and similar tools) that are constantly hungry for new material to improve their training.¹ In that moment, my decision was made.

As if that weren’t enough, shortly after, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s founder, lost his temper, highlighting how, despite WordPress being the world’s most popular open-source content management system (CMS), the increasingly centralized and authoritarian control over its development threatens the platform’s open and transparent future.

And so, the die is cast! It took a lot of time and effort, but starting today, this little blog has its own home: melabit.com/posts/en, where I can experiment with much greater freedom than before. Let’s see how it goes.

The new site is still a work in progress. The basic structure is in place, but there will definitely be adjustments and improvements in the coming months. The very first thing to do is to expand the international section, which currently contains only a handful of posts, with several broken links or links to the original posts in italian. Additionally, I would like to implement a system for notifying users of new posts.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to flag any issues or poorly functioning elements in the comments.

For technical details and the transition process, stay tuned for upcoming posts.

Rest assured that all old content and comments will remain available on melabit.wordpress.com. At least until Mullenweg kicks me out… 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

While it is true you can opt out of sharing your content—and I did—it’s also true that you must explicitly choose not to share your data, rather than the other way around, which would be more logical. And even then, there’s no guarantee that your content won’t be scraped anyway. ↩︎

Wordpress on Melabit

From melabit to melabit: why Jekyll?

From melabit to melabit: goodbye WordPress, hello Jekyll