I’m moving my blog from Tumblr to Jekyll/Github Pages. Why?

  1. Tumblr stopped Javascript support a while back, and had slowly been removing more and more site customizations I had in place. Seriously, checkout the D3 Demo here and compare it to my tumblr hosted post.
  2. Jekyll is in line with the static blog generator pattern I wanted to use for migrating my blog over. Serving static files is a lot more deterministic and cost effective than generating a site on the fly for a blog.
  3. Jekyll lets me customize the look and feel through easy templating, and lets me integrate with plugins I care about such as mermaidjs.
  4. Github Pages makes deploying changes as easy as updating my local jekyll server and pushing changes to the repo. And to top it off, it is free compared to my S3 hosting solution, which is already pretty cheap at about $1.50/month.
  5. I get to focus on blogging vs. deploying and setting permissions on S3.
  6. I get the one interactive feature I care about (i.e, Commenting) through utteranc.es, a nifty plugin that uses Github issues as a backend for commenting on posts.
  7. I’m using git everyday anyway. What better way to quickly jot a post.

This is gonna be my new blogging home moving forward.