This is my first an example blog post which is generated by Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages that I’m putting together to, well, show what a blog post would look like on this fine Web establishment.
I’ve finally migrated this site to GitHub Pages using an awesome open source project Jekyll a static blog generator created by Tom Preston-Werner.
Jekyll is a parsing engine bundled as a ruby gem used to build static websites from dynamic components such as templates, partials, liquid code, markdown, etc. Jekyll is known as “a simple, blog aware, static site generator”.
Over time, I grew to really dislike how heavy-weight other CMS platform is. I dislike how WYSIWYG editors make it really hard to see what HTML is being generated and tend to bloat the code that is produced. I found different CMS platform uses more and more plugins which make our site weight heavy and slow. In CMS platform, I was not able to do more of what I want to do.
So when I came to learned about Jekyll, I found out that it is the great alternative. I like the idea that my entire blog is a set of static files. Besides its simplicity and light weighted, it makes backups so much easier and avoids most common security concerns caused by running dynamic websites. I could even write my posts in Markdown or Textile which is the easiest way of writing blog posts.
I think this is the future of blogging with Jekyll which gives us great control to our static contents.
Why I’m using Jekyll and hosting this site on GitHub Pages?
In Tom Preston-Werner words,
It is automatically transformed by Jekyll into a static site whenever I push this repository to GitHub.
I was tired of having my blog posts end up in a database off on some remote server. That is backwards. I’ve lost valuable posts that way. I want to author my posts locally in Textile or Markdown. My blog should be easily stylable and customizable any way I please. It should take care of creating a feed for me. And most of all, my site should be stored on GitHub so that I never lose data again.
