I’m trying out yet another new blogging platform to see if it meets my needs. The good news about this one is that it’s completely free. Especially if I decide to host it on Github Pages. I really enjoy using Ghost as my blogging platform, but the major downside is that I have to self-host it and that costs money. I don’t really want to spend money so it leaves me with only a few options. I can use my existing wordpress blog on Dreamhost, but it’s a bit slow and wordpress is just too heavy for my needs now. I could use a service like Blogger or Tumblr, but I really don’t want to do that since I won’t have direct access to the database and all that good stuff. Since Ghost is looking to be out of the question, Github might be the next best thing.

The thing about Github Pages is the whole thing is generated from markdown files that I have on my local machine. All I have to do is commit to a certain branch, and BOOM, blog is online. It’s a really neat system, but the barrier of entry is a little high for someone who doesn’t already use Github for their day to day work. I’m used to doing a lot of this stuff thanks to my job, so it’s not too bad for me. Wrangling Jekyll took a little bit of work but there are some nifty plugins out there to get it up and running faster.

We’ll see how this goes and hope for the best. My major concern is being able to export the data from the Jekyll instance into another blogging platform if I ever need to. The good news is that I may be able to do it no matter what since the markdown files for every post are available to me all the time. Worst case scenario, I have to write a script to take all the posts and format them for me to meet the needs of the platform I’m moving to.

Either way, I’m pretty happy with it and we’ll see if I keep it up. I think it’s going well so far!