I finally finished migrating my blog from Wordpress to GitHub pages over the Memorial Day weekend. I started the process when I was in Maine at the end of 2019. I now find myself almost six months into 2020 and finally completed the migration.
The significant advantage of Wordpress is its ease of use to get started. However, trying to maintain a database, and upgrades made it a chore. I was also hosting it on Google Cloud. That meant I was responsible for maintainence and security. I also had the additional expense of paying for the VM and data storage.
GitHub makes a compelling choice. This is particularly true since I write my pages in Markdown, and it is a first class citizen on GitHub. I had issues everytime I upgraded Wordpress with the plugin(s) I was using to do Markdown on it. This was part of the maintenance headache that I decided to remedy.
Today I am writing my post on Dillinger running in a Docker container. I will save the post to my github repo, and push it. Travis CI will pull the updates, and build the pages and push them back to GitHub on the master branch.
I know that seems like a lot of additional work, but it really is not. I can also test my Jekyll pages locally using a Docker container to do the building to see what the final product is going to look like.
docker container run -it --rm -p 4000:4000 -v $PWD:/blog ruby:2.6.6 /bin/bash
Where the $PWD is the checked out blog. I set up an alias called docker-blog in zsh to run the container. Once the container is started, I go to the /blog directory and run the following:
cd /blog && \
gem install bundler jekyll && \
bundle install && \
bundle exec jekyll serve
That completes my local environment to blog until I am sure I like it and commit.