My site also has a new URL. It is now https://blog.james-dalton.net. If you bookmarked http://james-dalton.net you will want to update your bookmark. For now, it redirects here. I changed the URL so I could use this domain for more than just this blog. Not that I have any plans to do that yet, but at least now I can. I also pick up HTTPS for free from GitHub Pages.

Why the Move

Let me start by saying this move was not prompted by any support or technical issues with GoDaddy or WordPress. I still have my domain registered through GoDaddy and my new e-mail address for the blog (blog@james-dalton.net) is through them as well.

I was, however, frustrated with WordPress. I know I just said I didn’t move for technical reasons. WordPress is not a bad platform, just overkill for what I wanted. Initially I thought it would make a great platform for my blog. I learned a lot about WordPress and had fun tinkering with it initially.

But I really like writing in Markdown. If I could get away with writing my thesis in Markdown I would. WordPress would let me do use Markdown, but there was always a battle to get the formatting right when I was ready to publish. I liked writing local and the copy/paste the blog into WordPress. That never worked well for me. I tried writing online, but that didn’t work for me either.

I have another post I wrote about a year ago that I never published. Every time I thought about it, I would put if off because I didn’t want to fight WordPress to get it formatted right.

The Search for a new Platform

I started searching about a year ago. I first looked at WordPress competitors, but they were all more than I needed. The ones I looked at were great at what they did, including WordPress. What they did wasn’t what I wanted.

Then I remembered a coworker talking about static site generators and GitHub Pages. I wasn’t sure how that was going to work. How can you create a blog with a static generator? How would comments work? So, I asked google.

Several hits where top (n) lists. There were a few that made the top of multiple lists. I decided to investigate Jekyll, Hugo and another that I can’t remember the name. I installed them and played around with them. I wanted something that was easy to use, easy to style and allowed me to work the way I wanted.

At the same time, I was looking into hosting options. Azure was a possibility; I’ve worked with it before. What I wanted was a low friction hosting option. I didn’t want to have to worry about patching or keeping servers running. While I could do that with Azure, the more I looked at GitHub Pages the better it looked. GitHub Pages was easy to set up, supported custom domains, publishing with Jekyll was as easy as git push and is free. :smile:

Getting Started with Jekyll and GitHub Pages

Jekyll’s Step by Step Tutorial was a great guide. I still go back to it when I have questions. After the tutorial I wanted to work on styling. I didn’t want it to look the same as the WordPress blog, but close. I started with the Jekyll default theme, Minima. The sass layout and the simple file layout made it easy to get the blog looking the way I wanted. And then summer school started, and I didn’t have time to work with it anymore :disappointed:.

I tried to work with it a little during breaks but didn’t get much done until recently. The nice thing about Jekyll is it is so easy to use I had no problems picking up where left off even after not using it for almost a year. The motivation for getting it up and running came when I realized my GoDaddy WordPress subscription would automatically renew at the end of the month.

I finished the styling and copied my posts over. I only had three, so it was easy to do by hand. I wrote all but the first using Markdown, so it was easy to reformat them for Jekyll. The hard part where the code blocks and syntax highlighting. I wanted to keep line numbers, but the built in version with Rouge didn’t do what I wanted so I used linedivs plugin. A little clean up and everything looked great. Time to set up hosting on GitHub Pages.

And this is where I encountered my first disappointment. GitHub has a whitelist of plugins allowed and linedivs isn’t one of them:disappointed:. I had done too much at this point to change my mind. I liked Jekyll and the ease of hosting on GitHub Pages enough that I could do without line numbers. But I hated Minima’s default styling for code blocks. I wanted it to look like VS Code’s preview pane but was struggling to get it right. I liked the way Phil Haack’s code blocks looked so I checked out his sass files and finally was able to get it looking the way I wanted. The best part is I can use backtick for my code blocks:grinning:.

I looked at the plugins that are available on GitHub Pages and decided to only actively use four, jekyll-feed, jekyll-seo-tag, jekyll-sitemap, jemoji. I didn’t have to do anything for jekyll-feed. I did need to add my Google tracking ID to the _config.yml file to enable google analytics for jekyll-seo-tag. I didn’t have to do anything for jekyll-sitemap. I was going to pass on jemoji but found myself wanting to use it as I typed this. I will add in jekyll-paginate once I have more than 10 posts. Which at this rate might be a few years:smirk:. I may add avatar, gist and mentions later.

Now it was time to setup GitHub Pages. Jonathan McGlone has a great guide for setting it up along with GitHub’s guide. Setting up the custom domain was easy. It didn’t take long for http://blog.james-dalton.net to work, but I had to wait until the next day to enable HTTPS. The next step was to set up forwarding for http://james-dalton.net and http://www.james-dalton.net. After verifying the forwarding, the last step was to stop my WordPress subscription before it renewed.

If you want to check out the source behind the blog, go to https://github.com/jamesdalton/jamesdalton.github.io

Next

At some point I want to add comments, I like the way Phil Haack did it. Azure functions are mostly free for low volume and it would be interesting to do.

I’m hoping that having a low friction way to write and publish blogs will encourage me to keep at it. Other than work, my summer is open so I should get some time to blog. I have one ready to go and ideas for a couple more. Once school starts back up, I may blog about my thesis. It’s going to be on encryption so the blog will take a heavy math lean for a while. I’ll need to figure out how to do LaTex in Jekyll/Markdown.