Another Way Jekyll Helps Me Out

This blog runs on Jekyll. Which means I write all my posts in Markdown. Then I run a command to publish my site and it generates a static site which I upload to my web host. I have the whole publishing process scripted.

I did this because it was a time when I rarely visited this blog. And usually when I did, either a plugin, theme or Wordpress itself got hacked. Then I would have to spend more time unhacking it then I had spent there in the whole last year. All for a blog I didn’t write posts at.

Now, I get why that is funny. I am a software engineer with over 16 years of experience and my site got hacked all the time. And the reason was, I didn’t want the coding part of my life take over the writing part. And this blog was where I wrote.

Writing about coding is a hybrid activity, but most of the time my coding mind shuts down my writing mind. Oh, I can communicate. But it’s hard to write when you are editing your words 34 times before they come out of your fingers.

So I switched to Jekyll. If someone wanted to hack my site, they would have to go old school and raw edit every HTML file. With no executable code on my server, there is not much of a reason to hack it. The plan worked. Hackers are as lazy as anyone else. My site hasn’t been hacked since.

Recently, as I became more active here again, I found out other advantages to using Jekyll. It makes my blogging distraction free.

I write in a text editor, not in a dynamic dashboard. There are no comment notifications to distract me from writing. No plugins or themes nagging me to update them. There is not much to do in a text editor than just type.

So I think I am sticking with Jekyll for the duration, although Gatsby does look nice.