Learning out Loud in Milwaukee, WI

Switching back to WordPress

I’ve been writing this blog as a Jekyll for quite some time now. There’s a lot I really do love about the idea of static sites, but also a lot I’ve cooled on. One of those things was the writing experience.

My first encounter with Jekyll was at CFPB and I briefly switched to Octopress while I was learning how it worked. At 18F, I decided it’d be prudent to eat my own dog food, as it were, and host my blog the same way we hosted the site I was managing, 18f.gsa.gov. It’s been three years on Jekyll now and while I love a lot about Jekyll and the paradigm of static sites, I’ve grown tied of the work I have to do just to publish a new post. I’ve written about this before and won’t repeat myself but I was hopeful that there would be a product, open source or otherwise, that would give all the advantages of static hosting with a writing and publishing experience that was just as simple and powerful. The fact is, there’s not.

And it turns out easy publishing on a trustable platform is all I really want.

Getting here meant I had to write a Jekyll plugin and a page to generate a WordPress eXtended RSS (WRX) file out of the old Jekyll site. Most of the work was done in the liquid page, except for custom fields which were filled in with the plugin. The only problem I’ve noticed so far was about 22 pages with no title that were in the WRX file — these were Jekyll paginator pages and the WRX file itself also generated as HTML 🤷‍♂️.