At the back end of last year, I started migrating my various coding projects from SVN repositories stored on Google Code to Git repositories stored in multiple locations1. I found two different places for hosting my new Git repositories based on my specific needs. Firstly, the code for work needed to be kept private, but the rest of my code didn’t really matter. There is a lot of choice out there, but I wasn’t looking to part with any cash. Through a little bit of research, I came across the following options that appealed to me:
- Bitbucket - which allows for unlimited public & private repositories, but a limited number of collaborators (5 user maximum);
- GitHub - which allows for unlimited public repositories only, and unlimited collaborators.
I decided that Bitbucket was the ideal candidate for all my private repositories, but I decided to allow for some redundancy with the public ones. I’m therefore using GitHub for my public repositories and backing them up/ duplicating them on Bitbucket. Finding GitHub also introduced me to something else that I found quite interesting. GitHub Pages is a hosting service provided by GitHub that allows you to publish websites from your repository. Not only that, but it works with something called Jekyll.
Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server. Jekyll also happens to be the engine behind GitHubPages, which means you can use Jekyll to host your project’s page, blog, or website from GitHub’s servers for free.
This sounded like a brilliant idea to me so I therefore decided to move away from WordPress and try out Jekyll for myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still think WordPress is brilliant for what it is, but I’ve come to accept that it is too much for me. All I actually use my website for is writing a couple of blogs and displaying photos I have taken over the years. It is not exactly a complicated set up.
I have now completed the migration of my personal blog and I’m quite
happy with the results. I took the opportunity to modify the site theme and
this is what I’ve come up with. I hope you like it 
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For those that are interested, I am going to be publishing a series of posts about my move from WordPress to Jekyll including how I overcame some of the issues it presented. The full series will be available here.
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Both of these (SVN & Git) are version control systems used for the management of changes to documents. They are commonly used for coding projects to enable the tracking of changes and the ability to revert to a previous revision easily. My decision to change from one to another was purely out of curiosity and my inability to leave things well alone
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