As I read it, he had to sacrifice a lot of features (tags, archives, related posts) to gain... what exactly?
Every time he publishes a post he has to generate all of the pages again (because of the "recent post" links, etc.), which takes 6 minutes. With WordPress (et al.) it takes a few seconds.
I am not against Jekyll. It sounds like a cool project. But I'm just curious if moving from WordPress to Jekyll really is worth doing, even if you're a developer/geek and like to tinker with software.
If you need to do it for speed, consider using Varnish to cache most everything. Items you cache will probably be at least as fast to serve as static html.
(Btw. this reminds me of craigslist way of publishing entries).
Jekyll best serves a particular type of user and their needs. I'm a WordPress developer and make my living off it, but I absolutely hated using it for my personal site.
Now I can open my site in Textmate, make my changes, and use git to push to my server all in less time than it would take to do the same in WP. I don't give anything up(you can have archives, tags, and related posts in Jekyll) by switching and gain quite a bit of flexibility. Jekyll also fits into how I like to do things(ruby/textmate) which is incredibly important to some people.
So yes there are cases where Jekyll makes more sense. Depends on the user.
There are addons to most advanced editors to publish WordPress-posts directly from the editor (vimpress, wp-emacs).
Writing the posts in Markdown or similar is also trivial to do with WordPress.
Mind you, I'm not trying to advocate WordPress, but when I say WordPress you can substitute it with any simple, easy to install CMS.
I used to create my own CMS just for my blog. But then I needed some new features, but didn't have time to write them. So I just switched to WP, where most features are just an addon away. The only problem I have is that I need to update it whenever a security bug is discovered. For that security I see the advantage of Jekyll.
I'm guessing most people do it either because of security or for deployment into non-wordpress situations (e.g., you can basically host your small blog/site for free in App Engine).
For infrequently updated sites where there aren't multiple authors, wordpress is overkill and not worth the security concerns, IMO.
I am not against Jekyll. It sounds like a cool project. But I'm just curious if moving from WordPress to Jekyll really is worth doing, even if you're a developer/geek and like to tinker with software.
If you need to do it for speed, consider using Varnish to cache most everything. Items you cache will probably be at least as fast to serve as static html.
(Btw. this reminds me of craigslist way of publishing entries).