Moving to Jekyll

Introduction

I used to have an old blog on Worpress. As the time went by, I realized that:

• Maintenance cost was more than what I expected. My first deployment was an EC2 with no ALB and a internal database. I am very fond of the “treat you infra as cattle, not pet” principle, so I would need to move away the database to a managed one, while also having a method to deploy the infrastructure easily - ideally, with code;
• Wordpress was a liability. Over the years, Wordpress got a bad rap with the amount of vulnerabilities discovered. A few friends of mine have blogs with were hit because of them;
• infrastructure was a liability Having an EC2 means I would need to take special care to protect it - by updating the OS and libraries, ensuring that SSH is not widely accessible, etc;
• I wanted something minimal.

I am a big fan of gwern.net, not only by the writing style, but also because the website is aesthetically pleasing. I was surprised that it was actually static content generated from Markdown (https://gwern.net/about#design).

After some research, I found a tool called jekyll, which seemed a good option, so I wanted to give it a try.

Bootstrapping the website using Jekyll

After you install all dependencies (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/ubuntu/), you bootstrap you website with:

jekyll new site/ --blank

That creates a folder with the following structure:

.
├── _config.yml
├── _data
│   └── members.yml
├── _drafts
├── _includes
│   ├── footer.html
│   └── header.html
├── _layouts
│   ├── default.html
│   └── post.html
├── _posts
├── _sass
│   ├── _base.scss
│   └── _layout.scss
├── _site
├── .jekyll-cache
│   └── Jekyll
│       └── Cache
│           └── [...]
├── .jekyll-metadata
└── index.html # can also be an 'index.md' with valid front matter

(Reference: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/structure/)

Creating a post

The _posts folder is where all your posts go. To create one, add a file with the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP

For this post, the file name is 2025-08-04-moving-to-jekyll.md

(Reference: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/posts/)

Viewing your posts

Once a post is ready, you can see how it would look like by executing:

jekyll serve

Choosing a theme

The Jekyll community provides multiple themes (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/). My theme of choice was https://github.com/cotes2020/jekyll-theme-chirpy due to its look-and-feel and minimalism.

You can either create a new website using the jekyll new command, then download the content from github and replace it, or start from scratch by cloning the repository above. I choose the latter.

The template only supposed ruby 3.1. I used ruby 3.3.1 for that, managed by rbenv (https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv)

rbenv install 3.3.1
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/versions/3.3.1/bin:$PATH"

Customizing

You should change the website title and description by changing the corresponding tags on _config.yml

Publishing

Final thoughts

• Felt like I was on 2005 using Scriptaculous, with no extra bells and whistles
• Felt like “Arch for blogs”