So, after getting my second Drupal critical attack warning in 5 years (or so), I thought: enough’s enough. This CMS stuff is too big a hacker target and too fragile. Time to replace Drupal with something like Blosxom or something else lightweight and small. A little bit of research showed that the new thing was static site generators, where a suite of tools help you generate your site (and help manage the blogginess) on your development platform (aka. home computer) then push the changes out to the web server, all as static pages. The fact that all the points on this devil’s advocate list of why not use a static site generator all sounded good to me meant I was on the right track.

Searching around will show that Jekyll is the most popular of the bunch, but that’s not necessarily a reason to use Jekyll. The substantial user base means that it won’t just go away anytime soon is a plus. Open source, check. Non-database system data, interesting. Templating system with customizable tags, ding ding ding! I had been meaning to roll my own templating system for web site building with Perl’s Template Toolkit but just never got around to it. A search of Perl based SSGs showed that the most promising sounding one, Dapper had last been modified in 2014 so clearly there was no real community or support there. I had wanted to abstract my links to a central data file so that I could better manage link rot plus other custom shorthands and it looked like they would all be easy in Jekyll. The last detail that closed the deal on Jekyll is impressive set of migration tools they support. The promise of painless transfer is oh, so tempting.

So, let’s download this thing and try it out.