Well… I’m going to attempt something pretty major, here, and switch over my blog from my trusty Oddmuse instance to Jekyll… for better or worse.

There are numerous upsides to this. First, I’ve already built a lot of habits around taking notes using Vimwiki, and having recently made the switch to Markdown for that wiki1, having a consistent set of tools for personal and work note taking, as well as blog management sounds pretty attractive! Doubly so since I really enjoy the writing experience I’ve set up with Vim.

Second, this rebuild moves me to a well-supported set of tools that’s currently being very actively maintained. I’ve been a huge fan of Oddmuse for a long time, if only for its light weight simplicity, but its lost momentum over the years. Further, the dependency on a semi-custom markup, and the storage being in an oddball custom format, means I’m a little more tied down to its infrastructure than I’d like. Moving to pure Markdown means I get the simplicity of wiki-style markup without being tied to a specific technology platform.

Third, security. Static site generators are simpler, faster, and less complex to operate, and have a lower footprint for abuse.

That’s not to say there aren’t downsides! I’ve written a lot of content using custom plugins and markup, and I don’t know how I’m going to replace all that.

And, of course, there’s simply the act of transferring all that content.

But. I strongly feel this will be worth the transition.

And it gives me a project!

Update: And obviously I’ve moved! Of course, there’s lots of work left to do as I move into this new infrastructure. The site layout needs more work. I’d like an archive navigator. I need to enable some sort of commenting mechanism. But, so far so good!

And yeah, the tale of this entire transition and a rundown of my new toolset is probably worth a series of blog posts. Stay tuned!

  1. This deserves a post of its own. This move has enabled me to do things like use Markor on my phone to share the same set of notes on both my laptop and my phone, which has had the ancillary benefit of basically killing Google Keep in my workflows. It’s not without its issues, and it’s not something I’d recommend to a casual user, but it’s pretty slick… ↩