Falling in love with Jekyll

I’ve looked at the Jekyll website 🔗 several times over the past year, after seeing some of the awesome things others had built with it.Each time I left immediately after glancing at the install documents 🔗 and thinking it was too complicated to be usable. Wow, was I wrong!

It turns out that once you get past the terrifying install instructions, Jekyll is simplicity itself. To my delight I quickly found that Jekyll was almost everything I’ve ever wanted from a thing-that-makes-websites. Two hours in and I was a complete convert.

Full control 🔗

Using Jekyll you can create the basic layout of your site using just a handful of html and css, throwing in any logic that’s needed using Shopify’s 🔗 wonderful Liquid syntax 🔗 . Liquid too came as a revelation to me, it’s both incredibly powerful and gloriously simple. I had it doing exactly what I wanted in about 10 minutes.

So, clean html and css, mixed with lean and elegant Liquid. Wonderful. But, it gets better my friends.

Jekyll eats Markdown 🔗

Possibly the best bit about Jekyll is that it allows you to author your posts/pages in Markdown 🔗 . I love html, but I wouldn’t want to write a lengthy post with html markup, it’s just too many brackets and slashes and too easy to miss something out.

To write a post in Jekyll you simply create a new file with the post date and title in the url, this one for example is 2013-02-20-falling-in-love-with-jekyll.md.

That’s all folks 🔗

Jekyll watches the files in your site and, upon seeing any change, runs through your files and outputs them as a complete static html site. Then Jekyll slinks back into the shadows to watch for further changes.

With your entire site as static html, you no longer require a database, caching mechanisms or PHP(or similar). All of these things were there to ‘create some static html from a set of content’. Jekyll just did that in one hit.

I love Jekyll. I implore you, brave the install instructions and give it a try, I think you will love it to.

Bonus credit 🔗

Github 🔗 will happily host a Jekyll-powered site for you for nothing! If free, bulletproof hosting (with version control) appeals to you go check out Github Pages 🔗 .