I just spent the weekend experimenting with the idea of converting this whole blog from WordPress to Jekyll. It’s a blogging system that runs entirely off of static html files, and you can store your posts as individual Markdown files. Add a post and you can regenerate all of the indexes and archives at once and deploy the static site. The speed and stability increase is immense.

Exporting from WordPress to Jekyll took a good, I don’t know, five minutes. Since I stored all of my posts in Markdown in the WordPress database, it was basically a few minutes of scripting to add YAML headers and get things rolling. The biggest issue is WordPress-specific markup and custom shortcodes that I need to clean up. I spent way too long tweaking the design, though, and my weekend got away from me. In the meantime…

It’s up as a temporary test site on GitHub. It’s really, really rough; it’s very much still a work in progress, but I know you’ll be forgiving. nvALT 2.1 should be out very soon, and I have secret project keeping me busy right now, so I’m not giving any ETA’s on the final product. In the meantime, I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on Jekyll and other blog-related nerdery.