This post is the first post on the new version of this site. If you are a regular reader then I’m sure you noticed the much cleaner and more mobile-friendly design. But what you probably didn’t notice—unless you routinely scrutinize URLs—is that this is now a static site. I left WordPress.

Now, for most readers of this site this won’t matter at all. Load times will be much faster, but it wasn’t noticeably slow before. Other than that, moving from a dynamic, server-side site to a static, HTML site won’t make one bit of difference to you. But it does to me.

WordPress is not terrible. But it’s not good, either.

Since I started blogging in 2003, I’ve used almost every major platform. Blogger, WordPress, Squarespace, and then WordPress again. I’ve never been happy with any of them, really. So when I started my tech blog last year I wanted something different.

For that site I chose Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator, not a blog platform, per se. Using text files written in Markdown, Liquid templates, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS it generates my whole website in a few seconds. From there I host it on Amazon’s S3 for a few cents a month. Last month it cost me just under $.50 to host and serve the site.

Once I got it in place it worked perfectly. Pages loaded super fast, I could customize the site using the tools I’ve used for years as a web developer and not some janky themes or plugins. I was able to create a clean, readable, and responsive site quickly and host it cheaply. After using Jekyll for just a few months I began work converting this site to Jekyll today. This post is the first on the new site.

For me, the decision was easy. I went with Jekyll for 5 reasons:

  1. I first went with WordPress to use some fancy, SEO-optimized themes. The theme(s) were not worth the money
  2. Beyond those themes, all of the “features” of WordPress were not only unnecessary, they made it harder for me to create the kind of site I wanted. The platform is overgrown and cluttered with features that don’t add much discernible value
  3. I don’t need to post “on-the-go” from my phone
  4. I do all my writing in Markdown, and WordPress did not offer an acceptable workflow for it. Yes, even with the fancy plugins and Markdown “integration”
  5. Finally, and most decisively, I had the technical skills to code my own site

This last reason is why most people will not be able to make the same choice I did. Even with great guides out there like the one I used, implementing a custom Jekyll site is still beyond the average blogger’s reach.

But I think static sites like this one are (or should be) the future for most independent writers on the web. Depending on your business model, there are very few downsides. If you need a membership site or other server-side features this would not be a good choice, but otherwise static sites have huge advantages.

I’m not making a living off this site, so I don’t have those needs. So with Jekyll I can run this blog cheaply, easily, and it fits right into my existing writing workflow. It really is perfect for me.