New Website Workflow

I recently migrated this web site from wordpress to jekyll (hosted on github). Although I was happy with hosting this site on wordpress, it just felt like overkill for my needs. Jekyll was able to meet the basic needs of this site (i.e. easy to write posts and a fast site). I have migrated all of my old blog posts to this new site and am loving how easy and fun it is to add content to this site.

My workflow for adding posts (or editing existing ones) is simple. I have setup jekyll on my computers at home and launch a console session and fireup my favorite editor (vim) and start writing away! Below you will find the workflow I use:

• Start a command line console
• Browse to the location of this web site
• Enter the following command: jekyll serve --watch
• On my web browser, go to: http://localhost:4000 to view the site and changes being made
• Open up vim and start editing/creating content
• Go to my browser and refresh to view content
• Go back to vim and continue editing until satisfied!
• Once I am happy with the content, I save my changes and type: git push to push my updates to this site!
• Repeat as needed! :)

It’s a very calming feeling working on content from a simple command prompt and not feel overwhelmed with all the formatting options available to you on the online editor (such as wordpress). I just want to focus on the content and start writing away! Using markdown to format your content just feels much more natural to me (after spending most of my time writing code). And using my favorite editor (vim) to write up content is just the icing on the cake!