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title = "Static is good" date = "2015-12-28T15:02:00+05:30" tags = ["Meta"] thumb = "/img/static-thumb.jpg" description = "As a weekend project I switched from wordpress driven website to static website" keywords = ["jekyll", "pelican", "ruby", "python", "jinja", "static site generators", "pelican illustrator portfolio"] slug = "static-is-good"
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My old website was built using Wordpress with a custom theme. I had used this setup for almost 2 years. Recently when my hosting plan was up for renewal I decided to move to a new hosting provider, and while I was migrating my website I thought on renovating the website, just to revise and brush up the little bit knowledge I have about web development. Initially I didn't mean to switch away from Wordpress, but as I browsed and looked at some other peoples blog and portfolio I stumbled upon a ruby powered static site generator called jekyll.
I like the idea of using pre-rendered website rather than a database and cms rendered website. Using static website also meant I would get a fast and snappy website and users wont be required to wait for the site to fetch content from the database.
I also liked the fact the maintenance required is considerably lower than Wordpress website, where you have to update the engine whenever newer Wordpress version gets released. The website will also be portable I can carry it on a pen-drive or just copy the folder while migrating to a new hosting provider, no exporting and importing database contents etc. Believe me it is really less hassle.
You write the blog post in markdown with your favourite text editor (in my case Kate and Nano), then regenerate the website and upload the content via Ftp, scp or rsync. Some times I just copy paste the file by accessing the webserver from my file manager - Dolphin. Some Jekyll users use free Github pages for their websites.
As the content of my website is not updated on a daily basis I thought using a cms is a bit of overkill, hence I chose Jekyll here, there are other static site generator like Hugo, Roots and Middleman, I will eventually try these too but for now I am comfortable with Jekyll
While I am not a professional developer and I am just starting to discover things, with the help from my sister I have managed to build this website with Jekyll, I am sharing the pages and code on my Gitlab repository so that anybody looking for a simple portfolio website can use it. The code is not that great but I think it will be useful for noobish people like me who want to setup a portfolio website with minimal effort and focus more on drawing and painting :). The code is licenced under MIT licence while the original content like images, articles photographs are under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
I will be trying to improve the code gradually when I learn more, I am also welcome any tips and corrections from anyone. Feel free to fork it and use it to create your own portfolio website.
Update - Jekyll to Pelican
After dabbling a bit in Jekyll I now switched to Pelican, This was a natural choice as I found that pelican is python based and since I am learning python as hobby I thought it would be fun. Although Jekyll is absolutely good , pelican seems good for me now. It was fairly easy to port the theme and templates to Jinja from liquid. I am also learning restructured text to write the post. But I must agree markdown is simple and easy :)
Update 2 - Pelican to Hugo
I now use Hugo for generating this site, the theme hasn't changed much I also migrated the .rst files to .md file with the help of Pandoc and vim's search and replace capabilities