Migrating to Jekyll

January 25, 2022 [projects] #jekyll #ssg

I migrated this site, on a whim, to Jekyll and now it is deployed via Netlify, with the data on github. I am glad I did it, though it has taken longer than I expected to move the few posts I had on my old Squarespace site. Since I have spent all this time, I should rationalize my decision: I don't have to pay Squarespace $150 a year any more for hardly using their services. Squarespace's analytics product is nice, but not nice enough to keep me there, considering no one visits this site outside the family and the bots anyway. Besides, there appear to be some free alternatives that I could always use1.

A good thing about the process I now have is I don't have to keep making copies of my posts - which have always been written in markdown - before publishing it. I own my content, and it be versioned and tracked. Plus the whole migration was fun (and inadvertent - I only wanted to check Jekyll out, but it was so easy to get the initial site up on github pages that I went the whole way). And just as important, I finally have working footnotes2.

I am listing some of the resources I used in order to get this site up and running in case I ever have to do this again (and if you need yet another migrating-to-jekyll reference post #9991212).

Intial Setup

Styling

Misc.


FOOTNOTES

1

I tried google analytics and I didn't like it. It's also the best known tracker, which means many users can block it - like I do. Plus we know it's not really free. There are paid alternatives like Fathom, but at $14/month, too expensive for a tiny site like this. All I want to know is which posts are popular with some accuracy. There are self-hosted analytics like Ackee and Plausible that I will have to try one of these days. Cloudfare Pages comes with analytics support in the free tier. So there are options.

2

Yay!

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