I have decided to use Jekyll for blogging. In this article I will try explain the reasoning behind it.
Clean Slate - Full Control
Jekyll is simple. When you generate new blog, there are only a handful of files. You start with a clean slate and customize as you go. This is particularly important to me. I will have good understanding of what’s going on and will have full control over it. I can build the blog ground up, keeping it minimal and clean.
Lightweight
Jekyll is blog-aware, static site generator. Every time a page is requested, a pre-generated HTML content is served. No database fetch or runtime page building. It is fast!
Distraction Free Blogging
Blogging with Jekyll is as simple as opening your favourite text editor and drafting the post. Once you are done typing, fire up the terminal, generate static pages and push the changes. No fancy formatting, tagging, social sharing, etc. There is no community. You can’t follow someone or +1 someone’s post. It’s just you and your blog.
It’s Fun
Blogging on sites such as blogspot, tumblr, etc. is no fun. You sign up, register your blog, make a post using WYSIWYG editor and hit publish. It’s great for most users, but it’s boring. With Jekyll, you have to install and configure your blog, generate posts from markdown files and push the changes to wherever you’ve hosted it. It is a bit tedious but it gives the satisfaction of building something.
The Setup
I will be using GitHub pages to host my site + blog. index.html in the root directory will have a single page site. blog directory will contain static content generated by Jekyll. jekyll directory will include raw jekyll files. Every time I run jekyll build, the generated content will be stored in the blog directory. Everything (except drafts) will be pushed to GitHub.
There are some limitations to this approach. You can’t just sign in to your account from a new device. You will have to set up Jekyll on it. Syncing content across all your devices would be a bit difficult. But the way I intend to use it, I won’t have these problems. Though I miss the spellchecker in standard blog editors.
All is looking good for now but I don’t know how it will turn out. Will I get time to play with Jekyll? Will I switch to any of the normal blogging platforms? Only time will tell. For now, I just want to blog like a hacker :)