The recent redesign of this blog ended up being a lot more than just a visual redesign. In many ways it has come full circle. In the earliest incarnation of May Contain Blueberries, I hand built HTML pages for each entry. As that became more annoying I switched over to Movable Type in all its Perl glory. But as I was doing my own development in PHP, I eventually transitioned to Wordpress and while that has served me well (and the other users on my server), it was time to move on.
The biggest reason was maintenance driven by security. For a blog that I don’t write on very often (sadly once a year seems about the norm), I was having to apply security patches at least monthly, if not more often. The benefits of a fully dynamic blog platform was its downfall. Wordpress is such a large piece of software it seems that no end of security issues are being discovered. And as a solo system administrator I need to minimize my attack surface as much as I can.
I took two paths. There were quite a few blogs that are no longer being used on my server, so I took static “snapshots” of them. While this did break inbound links, they weren’t highly trafficed so I was ok with that (and search engines will figure it out).
For my blog, I decided to move to a static site generator. This has the benefits that I wanted such as templates, auto-generated index pages and such, but ends up serving plain HTML eliminating that security issue. I don’t need onsite interactivity so why pay the costs for it. I chose Jekyll. It allows me to write posts in Markdown and automatically build the site and push it to my server in one step.
On to the new thing! Who knows, I might write more (probably not).