As of last night my blog is completely powered by Jekyll. I made the switch for two reasons: performance and ease of use.

Going with Jekyll has allowed me to shut down MySQL as well as all of the PHP-FPM processes that were previously required to run Wordpress. This saves a substantial amount of RAM and allows more overhead for spikes in traffic. This would have been especially useful last week when one of my posts hit position 3 on hackernews and the frontpage of /r/programming on reddit. Fortunately, I was able to avoid any real downtime - but with barely any RAM to spare. With this setup I should be able to sustain that amount of traffic again easily - all on a small linode instance. All that is required to run the blog now is nginx, which simply serves up static files. Add in some intelligent compression and caching settings and you have a recipie for lightning fast performance with minimal overhead.

For my purposes, Jekyll is also much easier to use. I set up a Rakefile with tasks to publish and create new posts. I can create a post, write and edit it in vim, and then publish all from the command line. This allows me to be super efficient in my workflow and use tools that I’m familiar with. Versions are tracked in git, posts are edited in vim, and publishes happen over scp.

So far the transition has worked quite well, the permalink structure changed slightly which, unfortunately, means I lost the disqus threads for my old posts - but that’s been the only negative so far.