The most compelling reason was because it is supported by Github. There are a number of ohter features that were appealing to me though:
- Site generator instead of CMS or bloated app.
- Means that it can literally be hosted anywhere, and be lightning fast.
- Markdown is a joy to write and eliminates the struggle of working with an in-browser text editor.
- Don't worry about hosting, just blog!
My old blog was on wordpress, so I used the Jekyll wordpress importer to scrape out most of the data. I had some pretty ugly formatting, as I had tried using a few plugins and a markdown converter with wordpress before so the output didn't load properly into jekyll.
I used pandoc to clean up the output by converting my HTML to markdown - this actually worked pretty good.
The biggest problem was that my blog had already been up for a few years and was indexed by google and referenced on a number of places on the internet. I needed to keep my old links from 404ing or else i'd lose all the visibility my blog had gained. This was actually pretty easy - I just used some sed hackery plus the 'jekyll-redirect-from' gem and was able to redirect from pretty much any link that already existed to my blog.
My old blog had hooks to post to Facebook and Twitter when I made a new post. Since I can't use server side webhooks anymore, I'm using some command line tools to reference the post after it's been generated.
I really like tiny.cc for url minification because it allows you to create meaningful slugs.
Read the api docs and check out my poster.rb tool to see how I minify the urls.
Using t it's really easy to start posting from command line:
t update "My update with a minified link to my blog"
Unfortunately the best toolkit I found was in PHP. Oh well. I followed this guide and posting is done like:
fbcmd post "A post to my facebook wall"