Teaching an old blog a new stack
After messing around with the Ghost blog engine and Node.js, I knew I wanted a new technology stack. My daily work is typically in .NET, so that was preferrable. Playing with and learning Node.js was fine, but I found that having the learning curve between me and writing kept me from writing.
I was intrigued by the concept of a static website. I looked at Jekyl, and Octopress, which introduced me to the static workflow and GitHub Pages hosting. In the end, their Windows environment support wasn't great and it I still preferred to find something in the .NET framework.
So my list of requirements was pretty small.
- .NET framework based
- Static website
- Supports blogging in Markdown
- Easy to learn/use
- Fun to play with
Eventually, I found Wyam. Wyam is capable of a lot more than just blogging, but it checked all the right boxes. Setup was pretty straightforward, and working locally is simple.
I commit posts to my GitHub repo, AppVeyor sees that commit, pulls down the latest release of Wyam, generates the static files, and commits the results to the gh-pages branch, which GitHub Pages hosts for me (free!)
Still very much a work in progress, but I'm having fun blogging again. See a typo? Send me a pull request. Feel free to suggest features or submit bugs too. All the code is licensed under a MIT License and content is available as a Creative Commons attribution license.