Welcome to TrozWare’s new site.

It appears that I am not alone in deciding to move away from WordPress. WordPress is great - easy to set up and with lots of cool themes to allow customisation of your site. But it is slow, especially if (like me) you are running on a low-cost shared server.

I had been reading about Jekyll , so I decide to give it a go and also host my site on GitHub , taking advantage of their faster servers.

I followed the advice given by Girlie Mac and performed the migration from my self-hosted WordPress site. I am using the Pixyll theme by John Otander with a few tweaks of my own. The site is much faster to load, and I am hoping that the easier editing will inspire me to write more posts.

Of course it wasn’t all positive. WordPress did give me some features I liked, but I think overall the result is better.

WordPress

  • WordPress gave me a full LAMP stack, so I could run my own PHP scripts.
  • WordPress gave me a search function.
  • Commenting was built-in.

Jekyll

  • Jekyll builds the pages out as static HTML, so all pages are pre-generated for fast loading.
  • Writing for Jekyll is pure Markdown so it is easier to write and preview locally.
  • Some of the things I needed a plugin for in WordPress can be done natively in Jekyll: - tables - syntax-highlighting

For comments, I have switched to Disqus , but I am not sure about it yet. I will evaluate over the next few weeks. In WordPress, I used a plugin to handle the spam that inevitably arrived. I am hoping that Disqus will protect me from that, but I have to see how good a job it does and whether the few real comments are worth it. A better option might be to turn off comments completely and just have a contact form (which I have added using Formspree ). Working in Markdown is great. I love how I can have a really clean look in my editor and still end up with well formatted HTML. I use Coda 2 on my Mac as my standard web editor, so that is what I am writing in now. I will probably experiment with other Markdown editors as I go. And for any Mac users out there working in Markdown, I highly recommend Brett Terpstra’s Markdown Service Tools .