Why Jekyll?
18 Jun 2020
I figured a good way to start off my blog would be to write about why I chose to use Jekyll to build my site and publish blog posts. The biggest reason is that I’m using GitHub Pages to host and it’s “powered by Jekyll.” Now you could ignore this fact and use GitHub Pages to host HTML written however you like, but after looking into Jekyll I decided to take the plunge.
It’s Easy to Use
I know myself well enough that if I want to have any hope of publishing regular blog posts, it will have to be as painless as possible. Jekyll lets me write posts (and all pages for that matter) as plain old Markdown files which it takes and renders as HTML. Markdown is familiar since I use some version of it for formatting Discord messages, Reddit posts, Trello cards, read me files, among other uses. Markdown is lightweight which means I can write quickly and include formatting without interrupting my stream of consciousness. You can control how the content is rendered on a page by defining layouts that include your basic HTML structure and then use Liquid templates to control where content and variables go.
It Isn’t WordPress
There is no database behind this blog and the site is completely static. I like avoiding unnecessary complexity when I can and this kind of approach certainly achieves that. There are no dependencies that have to be maintained lest they become a CVE infested nightmare, no analytics, no fingerprinting, and taking up so little disk space, it loads super fast.
Instead, I author my posts in a designated location and then when Jekyll is run, it organizes them and renders them as HTML. The blog post index page is generated using a simple for loop in the Liquid template. Jekyll grants me some of the pros of using a heavy CMS like WordPress but also allows me to still have a fast loading static site.
It Allows for Templates
As I mentioned, Jekyll uses the Liquid template language. This cuts way down on duplicate code reducing the size of my project and allowing me to “simulate” some of the features of a dynamic site. Right now, I’ve got a default layout and a post layout that inherits most of it’s structure from the default. In addition to layouts, you can also create “includes” for any snippets of code that are frequently reused throughout.
Conclusion
Using GitHub Pages to host definitely nudged me towards using Jekyll but after having looked into it, I actually think it’s the right balance of content management, templates, and old school static for my use case. I did check out a few other static site generators including Hugo but the simplicity of Jekyll (and the fact that I don’t know Go) stuck out to me. If you are looking to try your hand at blogging or want to host a small simple website I would recommend the GitHub Pages/Jekyll combo. Of course, I haven’t been using it for very long so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt and may change over time.