Updating my webpage was on my todo list for a long long time. My previous solution consisted of a simple bash script that created static sites by adding a header and a footer to webpages to the actual content. While the solution kind of worked, it was neither flexible nor user-friendly.

I was looking for a solution that generated a static webpage, that was simple to use and glexible, and contained the possibility to write blog posts. After some searching I found Jekyll.

Installing jekyll on my laptop running on Ubuntu 20.04 was pretty simple for somebody without any experence with the ruby ecosystem. On my server things were a bit more complicated. While the Debian machine had jekyll already installed, the version was too old. However, after removing the Debian packages, installing the gem locally, and fixing a few issues, jekyll also worked on the server.

Converting my old webpage to jekyll was tedious but not really difficult. Most work went into converting the old pages in HTML to markdown. As a side-effect the pages are now easier to read and hence easier to modify and maintain.