I’ve just migrated from Blogger to GitHub Pages. This is the first post that I’m writing using the new platform.

The main reason for migration was that I wanted to write my posts in a lightweight markup language such as Markdown or reStructured Text. In Blogger I had to either use a WYSIWYG editor which is OK for simple posts but not for advanced stuff such as code snippets or formulas, or an HTML editor.

GitHub Pages have additional advantages:

• All the posts and the change history are stored in a Git repository which usually exists in at least two places, on a GitHub server and locally. Each can act as a full backup.

• There is a clear mapping between the content of the repository and the site. Even though I am using it for just over a day I can open any of my posts in a browser, click View Source (HTML) and say where every last piece of HTML has come from. This makes configuration simple, if I need to change anything I immediately know where to go.

• Now I can use the same tools for writing my posts that I’ve been using for development.

There are some disadvantages as well:

• You have to add yourself many of the things that are readily available on Blogger: comments, analytics, tags. Fortunately it is not that difficult.

• Error messages could be more informative:

  The page build failed with the following error: page build failed

• The documentation seems to be spread out between various places, namely GitHub Pages, Jekyll and Liquid.

I used this script by ngauthier to convert my posts. It mostly did the job although I had to do a little bit of manual cleanup.

Last modified on 2012-12-14