Formatting posts on Wordpress is tedious. It is one of the reasons that had kept me from regular blogging. I would prefer to write posts in my favorite text editor using some sane format such as Markdown. Finally, after stumbled on a Stack Exchange question about blogging platforms, I finally found my solution. It is Jekyll.

Jekyll is essentially, in its own words, "a simple blog aware, static site generator". There are already a few places discussing its virtues so I won't repeat it here.

The thing that touches me most is its simplicity. Now I can just fire up my text editor, write the prose, save the file, and commit it to my Git repository. All posts belong with me, no longer obscured in a MySQL database hosted somewhere I don't know.

Also, because of its simplicity, I feel excited to design own website for the first time. This thought never occurs to me when using Wordpress as theming Wordpress seems too much of a hassle.

Hopefully this move will bring me back to more frequent blogging.

Feb 10, 2011