Jekyll Archives – Jeff James

After much tinkering, I finally figured out how to make a decent static backup of my old WordPress site. I kept running into problems no matter my approach – whether I tried the web interface or wget – but I had a brainstorm recently that solved a lot of my issues.

The main problem with trying to create a backup in the WordPress web interface is that my site is on shared hosting and WordPress is a resource hog. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to switch to Jekyll in the first place. I’m unlikely to ever be able to afford dedicated hosting, so switching to a static site was definitely an economic choice.

After much tinkering, I’ve finally decided to replace my WordPress site with a brand-spanking new static version generated in Jekyll.

The Jekyll installation currently lives on an Amazon EC2 instance so that I can rebuild it from anywhere, but if EC2 starts costing too much money, I’ll probably configure it on one of my Macs instead.

I generally use a shell script to deploy the site; first, it does a Jekyll build, then it uses rsync to transfer the files from EC2 to Dreamhost via ssh/sftp. It took a little bit to figure out how to get ssh keys set up on both so that rsync wouldn’t prompt for a password, but in the end it all came down to file permissions. I’ve also configured Rake so that I can test my build with html_proofer and deploy the site using my Rakefile.

The coolest part? Thanks to Panic’s Coda for iOS, I can deploy the whole thing from my iPhone – start to finish!

The current template is called Skinny Bones. I’ve tweaked it a little bit here and there, but it’s mostly the same.

An archival version of my old site currently lives on at old.unsquare.com. I’ve only ported over a selection of my old posts, and I may eventually take the old site down completely.