A brief note to indicate we have migrated the FT Labs blog from WordPress to Jekyll.
Why not WordPress ?
- WordPress, whilst being largely fine, involved too much peripheral hassle.
- The theme we were using was in a bit of a mess.
- We had no immediately available WordPress skills (nor did we particularly want any).
Why Jekyll ?
- Jekyll gives us easy access to all parts of the blog, and we can easily build it locally.
- By using our ftlabs org GitHub accounts for Jekyll admin access, we can remove the need to maintain accounts in WordPress.
- Increased visibility of the blog and its workings to FT tech people.
- We can use the lovely GitHub Pages as a host, and remove another system from the list of Things We Have To Worry About (tm).
- Jekyll+Liquid is fun, robust, transparent and, so far, has let us do whatever we’ve thought of.
Gotchas
- We have striven to persist the permalinks of the old FT Labs posts.
- Now that we have set up GH Pages for the whole org, with a custom domain (labs.ft.com), we’ve had to unpick some of the lower-level, repo-specific GH Pages. They now all also share the same custom domain.
- We are slowly teasing out all the WordPress-isms which resulted from the initial, fairly brutal, recursive web-suck
- Does not yet seem to have lead to a marked increase in the rate at which we write new posts, so may simply have been a fine example of Yak Shaving.