Wyam

Well as you might have noticed the blog looks a lot different now. That is because I have migrated from Jekyll to Wyam.

The main reason for the migration was the technologies in use and how things fit better into my work flow. Jekyll is still a fine generator it just doesn’t fit into my technology stack well.

Here is a comparison of both static site generators:

Advantages of Wyam vs Jekyll

  • Wyam is c# based rather than Ruby based. Give I work with Windows and other Microsoft technologies this is a major advantage to me.

  • Wyam has a really easy to use cli and takes very little to get up and running. Simply download a zip file or install a nuget package with chocolatey.

  • Wyam has cake build extensions. Not only does this make working the site into my build automation workflow, cake build itself uses wyam to generate their website.

  • Easy live preview on windows. Jekyll has a live preview too, however it is really hard to get working on windows, you have to install ruby and then a bunch of gem files. Wyam you run it with -p -w and it is off and running, it will pull anything else it needs in via nuget.

  • Built in templates are really good. Wyam comes with some really good built in templates that are easy to modify with a settings file and front matter text in posts. This means you can get a good looking site with minimal effort.

Disadvantages of Wyam vs Jekyll

  • GitHub pages has native support for Jekyll so you can just upload your page source and it will generate it for you. Wyam you have to generate the static content and check it into the right branch in the repository.

  • Jekyll has a larger community than Wyam.

Future

What this means for the blog is, its a lot easier to post content and will result in me doing so. I am also going to migrate my game dev blog which I have been neglecting over to this system too.

I will be hosting it on danger.zone instead of burning.technology as I like the name more and I am going to be doing a lot more Game Development in the coming days as I am starting a course at AIE in Game Programming.

I will post more of an update once I have migrated it over :).