For about two years now I’ve been a user of the static blogging engine Jekyll. In that time I’ve enjoyed the simplicity of it. You generate your site offline and upload it when you’re ready to publish. For developers this is straight forward to do and but it also provides lots of possibilities for tweaking the publishing workflow. Jekyll has a library of supporting plugins that provide different behaviours and tweaks and allow content to be embedded more easily.

For all that Jekyll has though in terms of features, I’m struggling with it as a publishing tool and lately I’ve found it to be more of a block in the publishing process rather than a benefit. So, what to do?

For a while now I’ve been considering switching to a less developer focused blogging platform. A static web site generator like Jekyll is great performance wise but switching to a blogging engine that included a back-end CMS would provide more in terms of benefits.

Drafting and scheduling posts are two features that immediately spring to mind. I suppose there’s also the built-in editing of live posts that platforms like Wordpress and Ghost provide.

After trying out a number of blogging platforms over the last two weeks I’ve decided to switch to Ghost. Built-in Markdown support is a big factor in my decision to switch. With all of my posts in Markdown, porting everything over to Ghost should be fairly easy to do. Also it has just enough other features to cater to my other requirements. Tagging, code injection for JavaScript, themes and the ability to export my content should I ever decide to move again.

Lastly there’s the whole argument about your presence on the internet and the breaking of urls by moving to a new blogging platform. Well the solution is simple. The old site will continue to remain up and running for the foreseeable future while I port the content I need to the new site. This also allows me to start blogging again from a new domain. This site will now be my corner of the Internet from here on in. If you’re an RSS subscriber you start subscribing from here.

The new site also gives me another benefit. The chance to review a few of my previous post types. Fixie Friday will return to its weekly slot rather than being fortnightly. Link posts will also remain and will be limited to one or two per day. I’ve decided to discontinue the Snippet posts for the moment. If you’re looking to find out what I’m doing on a day to day basis then you can follow me on Twitter. Lastly my daily posts will become a weekly post rather than a daily post. Posting on a daily schedule was a challenge but it also forced me to sometimes publish less than ideal content.

I’m looking forward to moving my content over to Ghost and blogging again. I hope you’ve updated your RSS feeds to follow me at my new digs. Should be fun.