Moving my blog to Jekyll

Why moving away from Hubpress

Posted by Xavier Bouclet on August 02, 2020 · 4 mins read

Moving my blog to Jekyll

Why moving away from Hubpress

A few weeks ago, I decided to move my blog from Hubpress to something else. Indeed, Hubpress is not maintained anymore and I wanted someting close enough to want I had. Meaning, asciidoc (or markdown) based, publishable easily on Github Pages and with the possibility to get feedback from my audience (who knows ?).

Solution considered

After a few minutes on the web, I decided to look more into Hugo and Jekyll.

Hugo

Hugo is written in Go and is a static website generator. It’s possible to use Asciidoc or Markdown and it seems to be able to use Disqus which is the comment solution I already used with Hubpress.

Jekyll

I already use Jekyll because it’s the solution we use for the Montreal Jug Website. Same as Hugo, Jekyll is a static website generator. It’s possible to use Asciidoc or Markdown and Disqus. Instead of Hugo, it’s written in Ruby.

JBake

For the ones considering JBake, I moved from JBake a long time ago as you can read in my post on that.

Decision

I decided to go with Jekyll as I am already familiar with it and I don’t care about performance. The ones who do should consider Hugo.

Theme

I did some research on the web to start with a pre-existing theme and I went with Clean Blog

Commenting

As I said, I already use Disqus so I didn’t want to change. I would like a solution where the content doesn’t belong to me but at the moment I didn’t find any that meets my needs of owning my content. I am considering to move away from Disqus at some point for utterances that is based on Github Issues but I will be still not owning my content.

Blog migration

I was already using asciidoc so I copied all my asciidoc files directly to the post folder in Jekyll. Everything went smoothly and all the posts where generated to HTML with all the informations needed.

I add to adapt the images path with the new one in some asciidoc files contening pictures but a quick CMD+R helped me to change all the files in a nutshell.

So I avoided having to develop a batch to process all my asciidoc to migrate but with a lot more content it would have been the solution I would have used.

Automate the deployment

I had never tried "Github Actions" before so I decided to give it a try and it was as easy as following this procedure.

I took a few minutes to generate "et voilà !"

And now, because you are reading those lines I guess everything worked fine.

Conclusion

I miss Hubpress which has a web interface to edit the asciidoc but it’s completely replaced by the automating of the deployement to the Github Pages.