I’ve made the move from Wordpress to Jekyll, and Wordpress.com for hosting, to Github Pages which has Jekyll support built in. Combined with Github Pages (which is an awesome way to host HTML sites for free), this is a very powerful way to get an easy to manage blog with complete control and no sales pitch for extras.
In short, Jekyll gives you a framework to write your posts in MarkDown, and easily compile them to HTML by running a simple command.
Combined with Github Pages (which is an awesome way to host HTML sites for free), this is a very powerful way to get an easy to manage blog with complete control and no sales pitch for extras.
You just have to write your post in a MarkDown file, run a Jekyll command and then commit / sync your change to the GitHub repository. You even get optimisation of JS, CSS and images thrown in for free.
I first followed this simple Wordpress migration guide to move my posts, and hacked an existing Jekyll theme to fit my purposes. That migration mechanism left me with HTML files instead of MarkDown. I then used exitwp which was much more successful, but required a little review. There are lots of other migration guides on the Jekyll Import site.
I wish I’d seen Octopress before I got started—I’ll move to that when I get a chance.
Using your own domain is as simple as creating a file with it in in the repository, and changing the DNS to point at Github.
Get started by reading this simple Github guide.