Switching Back to Jekyll & Building My Own CMS
After flip-flopping about what I'm going to do with this site, I decided to flip to Jekyll and build my own little CMS while I'm at it. Because why not? 🤷🏻♂️
Yup, I’m back on Jekyll, folks. RSS subscribers will have received a load of “new” posts dumped into your RSS reader from me (sorry). As a result, a couple of people have reached out to see what I’m up to, so here’s my explainer. 🙃
Regular readers will know that I’ve been thinking about simplification for some time now, but I’ve always been torn between the convenience of a CMS, and the performance/simplicity of an SSG.
After lots of deliberation, I narrowed it down to a couple of options:
- Keep Kirby and rip out some of the complexity.
- Switch to an SSG and have a static workflow in Obsidian.
But, me being me, I ended up going with option 3:
Switch to an SSG AND build my own (simple) CMS.
And you know what, dear reader? I did that and it’s bloody brilliant. I’m actually writing this very post in my little CMS (dubbed Hyde because, you know, Jekyll & Hyde). Here’s some screenshots of what it looks like:
Hyde homepage
Existing posts list
The post editor window
The beauty of having Hyde as my CMS is not only that it works exactly how I want it to work, but it also removes content from the rest of the site. Within Hyde all I can do is load and edit content; I cannot do anything with the design, layout, or features of the site. My hope is that this will encourage me to write more and fiddle less. We’ll see.
It also means that there’s no Git CI/CD workflow getting in the way of things. I have a simple DEPLOY button that runs a Jekyll build and rsync’s any changes to my server. A build and deploy takes around 5 seconds in total.
Hyde is PHP based and runs locally, so no security issues or complexity is introduced, either. Publicly, it’s all just HTML, CSS and a tiny bit of JS. Lovely.
I’ve written a bash alias so when I type hyde in my terminal, it runs the local PHP server for Hyde, and starts my Jekyll server too. So I have everything I need for my little CMS, including previews, before I hit DEPLOY.
I’m really please with how Hyde is coming along. Sure there are still bugs and things I’d like to tweak, but it’s 90% there now, and as a result, writing this post has been just as nice as writing a post in Kirby.
Why switch?
That’s a great question, dear reader, and there are a couple of reasons for my switch. Firstly, why not? It’s fun and I enjoy doing this stuff, and that’s all the reason I should need really. But there are other reasons.
As I said in my previous post, the Kirby site was starting to creek with all the complexity I’d added, so things kept slowing down, crashing, and just being annoying.
I’d just like to point out that this is in no way the fault of Kirby, but rather my own (very shitty) coding skills. Kirby is fantastic and you should definitely consider using it for your site.
Secondly, my host (Ionos) recently announced that they’re doubling the cost of my VPS because they can no longer pass on a free Plesk license to their customers, so the incentive was there to find a lighter host too.
I have another month or so before the costs go up, so will work on moving this site over to a CDN host, like Bunny, I think.
As a result of going back to a static site, I’ve decided to forego some of the more complicated features that this site had. For example, the guestbook, watch log and various stats pages are all gone (I might bring back stats in the future though).
Notes have gone too. Instead, I’m just gonna use my Micro.blog site as my notes site, and will post via the Micro.blog app - much more simple.
Final thoughts
I’m super proud of how Hyde has turned out - it’s a great little CMS that is customised to my needs, and gives me just what I want and no more. It also abstracts content and site away from one another, so I can get on with writing and not be tempted to fiddle.
Right, that’s it. I’m gonna hit the DEPLOY button and hopefully you lot should see this post in a few seconds…