I seems somewhat obligatory to explain why you’re using Jekyll for your blogging platform of choice when you begin using it, so I suppose I should follow suit.

I’ve been using WordPress for years. I’ve never been a prolific blogger at all. I’m not at all sure that anyone cares what I have to say anyway, but it’s been at least a way to get some of what’s inside my head out of it. In every incarnation of my blog, I’ve always used a blogging platform of some type - I started on Mambo (pre-Joomla), moved to Drupal, and from there to WordPress - all self-hosted. I do have accounts at Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.com, but I’ve never been a fan of that lack of control over the site.

I suppose that’s the main point of now using Jekyll - I have total control. That also means I have total responsibility for everything about the site. I really need to learn how some of this stuff works. Despite my years of development experience, I’ve never gotten into Javascript. I’m in a position where I need to learn Ruby. With Jekyll, I can get some Ruby practice writing the Rakefile that helps me manage the site and the generators, converters, and plugins I use to generate the site.

Really, the big reason I’ve switched to this is because it’s something new to try.