I haven’t posted any new content in a while, but after logging in to my hosting provider and finding some suspicious files I didn’t put there, I decided it was time to finally move away from WordPress to a static site generator. I also wanted to move away from my hosting provider. Therefore, I figured GitHub Pages and Jekyll were my best bet.

I used JekyllImport::Importers::WordpressDotCom and more or less followed the first few steps on From Wordpress to Jekyll. This transferred a lot of metadata for each post that I didn’t need for my blog, and some that just flat out broke Jekyll. So I wrote a little Ruby script that cleaned that up, jekyll-clean-front-matter.rb. After that, I applied the Start Bootstrap Clean Blog styling, although I should have used the Start Bootstrap Clean Blog Jekyll repo instead since I ended up doing most of the stuff it did manually anyway. After that, I customized the styling a bit:

  • Changed the header image to something more appropriate, a microarray image derived from a public domain image by Louis M. Staudt
  • Dimmed the image so it was easier to read the text on top of it
  • Reduced the size of the header
  • Reduced the size of the fonts

You can see my customizations in the local.css.

The result is a faster, safer blog for everyone. Hopefully that means I’ll be blogging more.

Below are some tips from the dummy Jekyll post that might come in handy later, so I am keeping them around.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll’s dedicated Help repository.