Giving Jekyll a try
Today I’ve spent some time fiddling with the static (blog-aware) site generator Jekyll and this blog is actually created using it.
Jekyll is interesting (in my opinion) in that it allows you to blog using a light weight template engine such as markdown and not much else. Wordpress is a nice and all but I can’t say I’ve ever had a really good time while using WYSIWYG on the web and Wordpress is no exception. Not to mention the complexities of using a big piece of software for something as simple(?) as a blog. Then we’ve got the issue of getting code examples into blog posts. There’s lots of solutions for all these problems out there and probably as many problems more.
Jekyll is different than a normal blog engine in that it takes the template files and markdown files and builds it all into static html complete with rss feed and related posts. That html is what you upload and show your users on your out-of-the-box web server. What it doesn’t do is things like comments, admin gui (duh..). You could go as far as to say that it’s strength lies in that it really doesn’t do anything advanced. It’s actually so easy to use that there’s no real template project to start with when you’re starting up an new site. Personally I did what many other have done: “stole” the design of it’s makers blog
Now don’t get me wrong, Jekyll isn’t for everyone and it’s no silver bullet. But it IS an interesting approach to blogging for us geeks and I’m going to give it a try for a while.
Let’s hope this get’s me blogging again. Been way to long since the last time. My old home was on QBRANCH:CODE and I’ll probably keep cross-publishing my stuff over there.
