As I don’t do a lot with PHP nowadays the constant upgrading and other maintenance stuff for my old wordpress site became a pain in the ass. So, as you can see, I decided to create a static site powered by Jekyll. Not only does this setup get rid of the need to have a database, hosting it is free on github itself.
The github-pages setup itself is simple and documented well Adding jekyll is not hard either, most time was lost in choosing a nice template that will continue to receive some support and setting up required Ruby gems on my OSX El Capitan workstations. As I don’t use ruby a lot I decided to stay with the system Ruby and installed gem files by hand with -n /usr/local/bin Probably better though to use a homebrew variant. You only need the Ruby/Jekyll stuff when you want to preview you page locally.
For the theme I used the excellent Bootstrap compliant blog: https://github.com/BlackrockDigital/startbootstrap-clean-blog-jekyll The only downside seems to be a rather old Jekyll version: 2.4 as we speak.
I explored 2 ways to get my old wordpress content in my new blog: A jekyll based importer that uses a connection to the database to get content and converts this to .md files in your _posts folder. And a wordpress plugin. The biggest advantage of the wordpress plugin is how easy it worked and that it can even export content that is post processed by wordpress plugins. It will produce a .zip with a _posts folder and folder that contain uploaded media and other stuff. I still have some work to do with the image assets and cleanup of content, but a least no more crappy marked-up HTML.