First Post!

I figured I would go through a quick overview of what I’ve learned working with Jekyll, an awesome static site generator I am using to build my blog, and some things I want to do going forward.

What is Jekyll, and Why Use It?

[Jekyll is] “a simple, blog-aware, static site generator for personal, project, or organization websites.”

– Wikipedia

Instead of spending a lot of time, energy, and effort setting up important things like a database (to manage data), a programming language (PHP, Python, etc.), and potentially other services, Jekyll lets me get the needs I would have out of those resources all through offline commands, with significantly less effort than what would have been needed before.

It’s also helpful from a maintenance aspect: Jekyll generates static websites so I don’t need to worry about patching for a vulnerability in the software, or falling behind too far in updates needing manual intervention.

This makes it easier for me to focus on content for this website. It also scratches a personal itch for performance in a website, in that it is hard to beat the performance of static resources that don’t have to change (cache all the things!).

Who is Jekyll For?

Jekyll is definitely not the most approachable thing for people new to the world of web development. It is much easier to setup a blog and start writing on something like Ghost, or if you’re interested in getting paid for your content, Zarf.

That said, if you know a little bit about command line, going through semi-technical guides, and writing in Markdown, this thing could be for you.

Learning Jekyll

Jekyll has a fantastic website for learning the basics of how to accomplish things with it. From their main website I was able to gather setting a blog up, writing some posts, and making some small modifications to the site.

Once I went through the steps it became pretty easy to deploy: just manually copy a folder over, or build a script which will copy the folder over to my webserver.

Customizing Jekyll

One of the things that took a little more time to get into was customizing the design of a Jekyll default installation. I wanted to build my own theme, and themes are somewhat hidden from normal use. If I were to use a custom theme, it would have probably been fairly easy to get going, but as I wanted my own, I had to figure out a little about the stuff under the hood.

After some googling and experimenting, I got to expose Minima’s files, and from there ended up rewriting the sites HTML and SCSS from scratch.

This was the most time consuming part of the whole ordeal: working out how I wanted this site to look. Thankfully Jekyll handles rebuilding SCSS extremely quickly, and I was able to rapidly prototype out a lot of different design ideas arriving at the semi-final production you see now.

The End Result

I think this looks pretty good! This will be the first of (hopefully) many blag posts I want to write on this site.

Custom Design

In another article I’ll go into the custom design work done to get all this going on this website. To put it quite short, I rebuilt the templates that generated the HTML, and also built a ton of SCSS to get the effects that I wanted on this site.

Thanks to the ease of Jekyll, I hope to output a lot more writing content on the various subjects that interest me, and built up a more active blog to get my thoughts outside of my head.