Aziz, Light!

About a month ago (August 7th to be exact), I took azizlight.me down after announcing it on Twitter. I had realized that Wordpress is extremely bloated for a simple personal blog. But I would be lying if I said that this was the only reason; I wanted to try something else. The first thing that I tried was Tumblr. I loved how simple it is, but soon enough I discovered how inflexible it is too! One thing that threw me off is the archives: that are really ugly and not customizable… I didn’t even want to try Posterous or Wordpress.com.

The perfect solution for me (the one I am using right now) was the combination of Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I wanted to try it for some time now, but two blog post gave me the motivation to actually do so:

• The switch to Github Pages by a fellow forrst member, Sirupsen — it’s actually one of his forrst posts that lead me to his blog post.
• Publishing a Blog with GitHub Pages and Jekyll — a blog post by Envy Labs introducing Jekyll and GitHub Pages; I found it while googling.

Jekyll is really the perfect blogging tool for hackers and a very good compromise between minimalism and functionality. It’s very well documented, very easy to use, very flexible and very transportable. That’s right, Jekyll is a blog-aware static site generator, which means that it’s file based. This also means that it can be versionned with git (or any other scm), it’s a lot easier to backup posts and pages, or export them from or to any other blogging engine. To gain a better understanding of Jekyll’s philosophy and functionalities, I suggest this great blog post by Tom Preston-Werner (aka mojombo), creator of Jekyll: Blogging Like a Hacker. Jekyll also has a very complete wiki.

Other things changed too though. Until now I have been managing all my domain names through GoDaddy; I wanted to change that, for obvious reasons. I had heard a lot of good things about Gandi and their “no bullshit” policy, so I gave it a shot. Even though I was expecting to have a better experience with Gandi than with GoDaddy, I was very impressed. First of all, they don’t try to sell you all kind of shit and that’s a big win. Also, all the domain name operations are amazingly fast to process: the registrar transfer and the nameservers changes were both really quick.

Another thing that changed is analytics. For the past two years and a half, the cool thing to use was Mint, I had to give it a try. I bought a license a couple months ago, but I never used it. Now Aziz, Light! is monitored by Mint, I’ll see what it’s worth compared to Google Analytics. My first impression is that it’s a lot simpler, the design is a lot cleaner and it’s actually pleasant to use it. It doesn’t have as much features built-in but what do I care, monitoring this site is really a matter of curiosity. On the upside, Mint provides Peppers, which are basically plugins that add functionality; users can also create their own Peppers, pretty cool.

So in conclusion, if you’re a hacker/geek, or a hacker/geek-wannabe like I am, then I highly recommend the Jekyll+GitHub combo. I think it’s probably a bit early for me to recommend Gandi or Mint just yet, but as far as first impressions go, it’s very probable that I might very soon.