It’s been long overdue, but both the Visoft main site and our blog have moved off of WordPress. We are now using Jekyll to statically generate both sites. This allows us to host our sites just about anywhere as Jekyll spits out plain old HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Aside from a static site, Jekyll allows us to cleanly use Markdown for our posts. We were using Markdown with WordPress and while it worked ok, it would occasionally mess up our content. No longer is this the case with Jekyll.

Static Site Disadvantages

There’s one big disadvantage to static site generators in that the site needs to be generated anytime new content is added. I don’t see this as a huge problem, but it’s something to be aware of if you are deciding to switch to a static site generator. I’m thinking that I may work on some sort of API to handle posting such as the one @maxjacobson has done. He also has a blog post about his process.

Syntax Highlighting

Last year, I wrote about switching to highlight.js for syntax highlighting. Since the move to Jekyll, we’ve switched over to Pygments instead. This allows for us to just use some CSS to style everything and the parsing is done at compile time. This also allows for us to use line numbers again where applicable.

Your Thoughts

What do you think of the new sites? We’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.