The site looks a different, huh? A new layout and new blogging engine to boot.

I've used Wordpress to power the various iterations of Halfway back from Reality since I bought my first domain in early 2004. While I didn't use the first public release of Wordpress in 2003, I jumped onboard soon after 0.71 dropped in. Over the years, I've explored other options but always came back to Wordpress.

The thing is -- I didn't see why I needed the overhead of PHP and mySQL for a site that isn't really all that popular. I used WP Super Cache to create a static version of the site anyway, so the dynamic options of the site were rarely used. It's a little funny, because part of the reason I moved to Wordpress (from Movable Type) back in 2003 was that Wordpress was dynamic and could generate my site on the fly.

I initially looked into using Toto as a lighter alternative to Wordpress but soon realized that I might as well go all the way to a static site generator. Upon suggestion from @ascarter, I took a look at Jekyll, the generator used over at Github. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I liked it.

Moving to Jekyll isn't without its disadvantages though. Jekyll is definitely a hacker's blogging engine, and requires you to muck with code and templates. So while I actually switched everything over to Jekyll a week ago, I didn't post till I created my own layout. Luckily, I didn't have to do much with Ruby and the Liquid templating engine used by Jekyll isn't all that different from the Django templating engine I've already used before.

I also don't get things like comments, tags, dated archives, and post previews out of box. Comments, especially, require going to a third party service likes Disqus. But seeing as I haven't had a comment yet -- not missing much. If someone really does need to comment, they can respond on their own blog and just tweet at me. If I want to switch to Disqus, I can always turn that on later too. The rest of the features are easily to added into Jekyll via plugins. In fact, Jekyll Extensions makes this trivial.

So, here I am, with a relatively new blog and a new blogging engine too. Ch-ch-changes.