I just launched a re-design of my blog and as part of that I migrated from Drupal to Jekyll. There have been a number of Drupal blogs that have recently converted to Jekyll and I wanted to share my motivation for making the switch.

Note: While I may have moved my blog from Drupal I’m still doing Drupal development daily.

Performance

Over the past couple years I’ve grown really interested in website performance. I’ve spoken about it and written about it. I can firmly articulate why performance is so important. So, when I decided to make a change to my site I wanted to make a move that easily allowed me to control the elements that impacted performance.

Using Jekyll enabled me to have fine grained control. Jekyll isn’t something I would hand out to everyone or use on every project. For a developers blog (who already writes in markdown) it can make a lot of sense. In addition to the fine grained control over the page the output is static pages. Static pages are going to be faster than something dynamic. For this use case that’s OK.

Drupal Woes

In the land of me using Drupal things are not all happy all the time. Let me explain:

• I can be lazy at updating for security releases on my personal site. The Drupal version of this site didn’t matter all that much so I was lazy. With static pages I no longer need to deal with this.
• I wanted to move to some “cheaper” hosting in the form of shared hosting. This site was previously hosted on a VPS. It needed to be there. I was either going to update to Druapl 7 or switch. I’ve seen Drupal fail on shared style hosting and the one I’m on in particular. This is a problem.

Playing With Something New

The biggest reason for making the switch - by far - was that I wanted to play with a new piece of technology. As I’ve discovered, doing Drupal all the time keeps me from growing and learning from the technology landscape all around me. It’s like a painter using the couple brushes he already has and sticking with the same 10 colors he uses all the time. Sometimes you need to test out other brushes and colors to continue to learn, grow, and be creative.

Update: I’ve posted about how I migrated my blog content, tags, url aliases, etc.