Huzzah. I’ve successfully migrated this blog from an ancient version of Mephisto to Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. Since it’s statically generated, I don’t need a fancy hosting platform anymore, so I’ve cancelled my $20/mo Slicehost account and begun hosting the content out of a cheap Dreamhost account. Yeah, that Dreamhost.

If you’re thinking of making the move yourself, I’ve got a couple tips. First off, New Bamboo has an article that goes over the migration process. After that, the biggest pain is preserving inbound links because Mephisto and Jekyll generate their pretty URLs differently. I followed New Bamboo’s lead and forked my own version of Jekyll that patches this.

As for the deploy process, I’ve got it down pretty simple: I build the entire site locally, then rsync the result to Dreamhost. I’ve read about some complicated setups that use GitHub post-commit hooks to have your server check out the latest version and build it in place, but I think rsync does the trick just fine. It also means my Dreamhost account doesn’t need Ruby, the latest gems, nothing – just a dumb folder system where I can dump static content. So far, pretty happy about it.

Now, just to do something about this design …