So, I finally did it. I left WordPress.com and moved on…

What happened?

I’ve been wanting to move on to my own site for some time..
I came across Barry Clark’s article in Smashing Magazine regarding migrating from wordpress to jekyll + github pages.

GitHub Pages - the revelation

GitHub pages?
Aren’t these the cool front pages of many projects I love? (i.e.jasmine, webpack, etc…)

So I went to github pages docs, and realized that this domain (+ hosting!) is free! for every github account!
WOW! just watch the video…

Jekyll - first ruby baby steps

But what is jekyll?
Apparently, it is a simple Ruby framework that generate a (static) site from some content + templates.
Something like one-time-compiled jsp…

I read a bit, and found jekyll-bootstrap and jekyll-now, 2 seed projects that made to help you give birth…

Then I started looking for themes…
I found Poole, and I liked it.

History - what about WordPress.com?

What about all my old posts?
There are several suggestions over the web, but I finally used a simple tool called wpXml2Jekyll, which transforms a wordpress xml into a list of jekyll md files. Very recommended..

So, what did I do?

• clone Hyde, a Poole theme.
• add my posts.
• add some tags - check out Joe Kampschmidt post
• add share buttons - check out Kanishk Kunal post
• add disqus integration - check out DSQUS docs
• add next & prev buttons - check out David Elbe post
• play with intellij customization - check out Hadi Hariri post
• add google analytics - check out Michael Lee post

Show me the money…

Well, since I didn’t buy my own domain yet, it’s free under <username>.github.io. Total time invested in investigation and implementation: 2 days.

What’s next?

I don’t know.
but I run my own site.
I can play with it.
And I will…

Follow me!