Thomas 🧑‍💻

Abort the mission, I've fallen in love with Jekyll

When I initially did the setup routine and migrated my previous blog to Jekyll, I saw it as a temporary thing while I redeveloped my bespoke blog engine “SquareCMS”. What I didn’t anticipate was falling in love with the workflow of, developing for, and writing with Jekyll.

A geeks platform

Also known as a “hackers” platform, Jekyll really is designed to be tinkered and messed with. Unlike with SquareCMS, I have an easily tinkered with testing environment (my home PC running Ruby) that is (most unlike PHP/MySQL development) easily synced with the running–“live”–environment.

Unless you need extra features, generated flat files are fine

“Compiled” in around a second or so on my machine, and uploaded in less than a minute, my entire site is now a group of flat, procedurally generated files. Think about it: do you really need a server-side computer generating the same page for every visitor every time they visit? Not especially. I don’t need plugins, multiple authors, server side management, search; I just need a quick-to-use, quick-to-post-to, easy-to-tinker site, and Jekyll provides it.

Abort the mission, I’ve fallen in love with Jekyll.