Jekyll is awesome

Oct 3, 2015 | |

Wordpress is everybody’s favourite blogging platform. It’s simple, and you can be up and running within minutes. There’s a few caveats, though: your site isn’t as customizable as a self-hosted installation of wordpress can be and that can be a little more complicated to set up. Then once it’s setup you’ll end up with a slow-as-mud website and no upward scalability. What if in the future you wanted to add a rails application to your website and move the blog to a subdomain? Can’t do that here.

Simplicity is the name of the game. With Jekyll your content is the first thing you start creating, then you have Jekyll build your site and you’re left with a completely static website that you can host almost anywhere. The advantages to this are great: since the site is static and doesn’t require a database, hosting it is a cynch. You might even be able to host it for free! Since there’s no database there’s nothing a naughty user can mess with to damage your site. Finally since there’s no database calls to be made your site becomes incredibly fast. I think the pros far outweight the cons. If you don’t mind your site’s code being public then you can host it completely for free on github pages, too. Then it’s just a matter of pointing your domain there, setting up your cname file (a painless and simple setup) and you’re done!

Jekyll isn’t for everything, though. It’s not going to replace Ruby on Rails and you’re not about to build a large scale web application with it. The best fit for a Jekyll site is, I think, most often the one that needs it most: users that want to build a website, but don’t want to pay an arm and a leg to just get a simple message out there. Even if programming isn’t your thing setting Jekyll up is a breeze, and I can help you out with that.