New blogging software, Jekyll & Amazon S3

I’ve been hosting my CF blog with Blogger for a few years now; I liked it for it’s price, but not much else. What I’ve been after is a static blog that I can publish to a CDN, giving me a ‘serverless’ website that I still have total control over.

Enter Jekyll CMS

From the brilliant mind of a co-founder of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner, Jekyll is a ruby script/framework that allows you to ‘Blog like a hacker’, entering your blog entries into plain text files and publishing them over the command line.

I won’t go into the gory details of Jekyll, a good deal has been written on the subject. A couple of good starting points though:

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.html
https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki

In a couple of nights I’ve managed to get up to speed, migrate from Blogger (including comments hosted using Disqus) and deploy my site to Amazon S3. Sure, it’s not that pretty right now but one day, maybe…

I’ll be sure to update with a post on my setup if I ever get any free time (I’m to be a father in October, I may have to cram in all the blogging time I can before then!).

Anyways, time to sign off.

Dominic