All jekyll, no hyde
I'm not a blogger. Odd coming from someone who is writing those words on the very thing that he professes that he does not use. It's true. At least it was, until I discovered Jekyll + Github.
Jekyll is a static website generator written in ruby that is open source and blog aware. It scans your Markdown files (you can use HTML as well) and constructs CSS-wrapped static HTML files. It uses the awesome Liquid templating engine to do all kinds of cool stuff (take a gander at the source of my archive page for a real world example).
You can install Jekyll locally and have it track your
changes and auto-generate your website whenever you make modifications. Just run the
following code and navigate to localhost:4000 with your favorite browser to try it
out:
jekyll serve -w
If that wasn't awesome enough, Github lets you host your Jekyll blog for free. Most likely you are already using git for versioning anyway, why not use it to deploy as well? All it takes is a simple
git push
to deploy the latest version. The best part? You own your data. All of your
posts sit in a _posts/ directory on your computer, not in some CMS somewhere.
Plus, static sites are sweet:
- Fast
- Low bandwidth
- Easy
- Fully customizable
Additionally, there is something profounding satisfying about building and sculpting your very own system that you do not get if you are using any generic blogging service (blogger and the like). I had that experience with Jekyll and it might be enough to get me into blogging, something that I have never really experimented with in the past.
