Moving to Jekyll while moving irl

I’m back! I probably should not have started this thing right before a real life move, but here we are. This post is going to be just a quick update on the site platform and where I am going from here.

The big move was from the website using wordpress to using jekyll. There are a few reasons why I moved.

1.) Version Control!!!

Using Jekyll allows me to use git as well as a consistent workflow of developing a post or project and pushing it to my production server.

2.) Simple code snippets.

Jekyll makes it very simple to insert code snippets:

varname <- "Hello Jekyll!"
print(varname)
#prints "Hello Jekyll!".

which brings me to my next point:

3.) Ease of Project Export.

As I will be using a lot of python and R, which makes it is very easy to publish outputs from these projects as markdown or html files. This should help me actually show some of the work on the blog, instead of just on github.

The real key is that it will make the step from writing code to writing about the code that much easier… which might get me to actually do it!

4.) Wordpress was just too much.

Wordpress has tons of awesome features for managing content (which i guess is why they call it a content management system). A lot of these features like comments, search engine optimization, and mailing lists, were just things that I did not need.

In summary, Jekyll will let me have a simple, reproducible workflow and lower the barrier to entry. The next step is finding a way to proofread my posts before pushing them.

P.S. The reason I moved to a house is so my dog can have a yard.