Finally, another post

Finally, there’s another post from me.

It took a while. And to be honest, I wasn’t really planning on writing on There is more than IT, but since I migrated the site from WordPress to Jekyll I thought it would be good to write something.

In the years that I have been blogging I used various systems and sites for it. I went from Blogger to WordPress, and now from WordPress to Jekyll.

I’m also blogging on a popular virtualization blog, VMGuru, which also is created with WordPress. We use a lot of plugins to add functionality to WordPress.

WordPress is a great system and has a lot of plugins that can add things and functions to WordPress it originally didn’t have. That is also the problem I think.

This extensibility of WordPress comes with a price:

• When you upgrade WordPress you have to make sure your plugins keep working
• Plugins come and go, so if you want support you have to keep up with all the plugins you have and you even might have to switch from one to the other
• Each plugin adds to the code your webserver needs to execute
• Plugins are, just like other software, susceptible to bugs and security risks.

Why Jekyll?  

That’s a good question. First let me explain what Jekyll is.

Jekyll is a static site generator. It generates static (HTML) pages from a text file. This is mainly a Markdown file.

Jekyll splits the layout of your website and your texts. When you created the templates that your site uses you don’t have to worry about how the pages are going to look, they will look good.

From then on you can focus on writing your posts, articles, blogs or what you want to create with an easy to understand ‘language’.

For example a hash (#) is a heading type 1 (H1), each hash is a smaller heading (h2, h3, etc)

When you want to start a list, you just type it with a ‘*’.

* item 1
* item 2
* item 3

And it creates:

• item 1
• item 2
• item 3

The same goes for *itallic*, *bold*, etc.
Check out this Markdown site for more on Markdown.

When you’re used to it writing Markdown is easier and more distraction free than all those nice WYSIWYG editors in WordPress.

Since I started with Jekyll I converted and started a couple of blogs to it:

• www.famelsinga.nl – our family site (Dutch):
• www.huisgemak.nl – a smart homes / living comfort site
• thereismorethanit.com – and ofcourse this site