Hello Jekyll
Update: I’m no longer using Jekyll. You can follow the journey here.
I needed to develop my personal brand. I registered this domain many years ago simply because my name was available, with no real plans for what to do with it. Separately, I’ve tried writing blog posts on various blogging platforms but usually gave up after a few impassioned posts. I finally decided to establish my digital presence with a blog at my own site.
Goals
- Reduce friction for writing new posts
- Experiment with new web development frameworks
Second point first; My day job primarily involves working on mobile app development. The last website I built, involved writing a bunch of static html pages in Notepad and publishing them via FTP. New web frameworks were popping up daily and I didn’t want to get too far behind.
All my previous blogs failed because of the effort involved in working in someone else’s platform. I often spent more time fighting the platform trying to customize it. A system that allows me to focus on writing is the highest priority.
Development
I tried Wordpress because I had heard that it allowed for an incredible amount of customizations. After a quick trial, the product was just overwhelming, designed for big publishing companies with multiple authors and a convoluted setup process.
Next I tried Tumblr. Mostly because it had a mobile app which I figured greatly reduce the friction in writing whenever and wherever I felt like it. While there were many themes to style your site, there’s not much you can customize beyond that.
After briefly considering going back to Wordpress, I heard about Jekyll.
“Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator.”
Jekyll takes plain-text blog posts formatted in Markdown, slaps on a template and generates a static web site.
I didn’t care enough to migrate my old blog posts, but I took a test a run at Markdown by writing this very post. The plain-text writing with the markdown syntax was legible and made it easy to visualize the structure.
I then took the time to build out the template for the entire site. My CSS skills were still a little rusty, but I got a decent design working and vowed to come back to it later once the site was up and running.
Deployment
Working locally was pretty easy simple since Jekyll was generating static html files and I could view and navigate to all the pages directly in the browser.
I wanted to get past uploading html files directly to a folder on a hosting server. We had used Heroku for a few projects at work. I was familiar with the process and was able to quickly push the website live.
Moving Forward
So I’m basically back to building static pages, but this is way cooler. Only thing left to do now is write!