A little while ago, while listening to Build & Analyze, Marco and Dan we’re talking about the idea of having a static page blogging system. It was a fairly simple concept… Store all your posts in Dropbox, and have a system that could automatically generate a full website based on those posts.
In a way, it makes a lot of sense. Blogs started out as static sites, and only moved to dynamic code when people wanted things like comments or trackbacks on their site. But in the days of Disqus, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense to have a whole site regenerate a site from static content. Add the fact that I get very few comments, and no trackbacks, it’s really just a waste of processing power.
My site has been hosted on Posterous for awhile now. And I’ll be honest, I really have nothing against them. If someone was going to go into blogging for the first time, they’d be near the top of my list – it has a lot of great features. But, it also has a few small nagging items – which wouldn’t bother normal people. But, I’m an nerd, and nerds aren’t normal.
Marco was starting from scratch, which is fine for him. Since I knew that I was going to probably add a lot of stuff to this system (and since Marco still hasn’t released his code for his yet), I decided to do the smart thing and look for some other system to build on top of.
Since I’m living the Ruby lifestyle these days, I decided to start messing with Jekyll. Jekyll is great. It does the bare minimum of what I needed to get started. It takes a directory of posts and creates a static site around them. It handles Markdown, it has a basic plugin system and it uses a decent template language. So after exporting all of my posts from Posterous, I proceeded to start hacking the thing up for my benefit.
There were a few things that I really appreciated about Posterous that I wanted to get into my own system. The first was the ability to create blog posts via email. While I didn’t always use this, I really liked the idea and did post about half of my articles that way. It also is a very easy way to automate posting from other systems (I’ll get more into that later). The other thing was the Autopost system. I loved being able to create a post, and have it show up in Twitter, Facebook, etc. Of course, they have a ton of infrastructure dedicated to this system, but I at least wanted to hack together a very basic system.
After roughly two weeks of hacking here and there, I’ve changed my site to point to my Jekyll blog instead of Posterous. While the site isn’t completely done (will it ever be?), it’s at least far enough along that I felt it was ready to go live.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll do some posts that give specifics on how it all goes together. It’s a fairly complex system, and while totally unnecessary, it helped me learn a lot… and that’s what it’s all about.
If you’re interested in the code that’s gone into this, you can check out my Jekyll Fork, my templates and plugins, and my email-to-jekyll script.