Jekyll

“Hey, think I’ll set up a tech blog” has quickly turned into “I’m on day three learning this cool Ruby framework Jekyll“… but at least I’m enjoying myself. I got started with these excellent instructions and code from Chad Baldwin.

I found Github’s choice of Jekyll attractive right away. A static site generator: perfect! Minimal, just enough technology. Ability to write in markdown. Use the post naming convention, and you’re off to the races with a blog.

But Jekyll has some gotchas. I found it particularly awkward having to hunt down the release of the minima theme that Github has installed (it turns out to be 2.5.1 as of now), because the base files of Jekyll themes live in Ruby gems. So if you’re not building in your own Ruby environment, like me using Github Pages, it’s not immediately apparent where the theme boilerplate is coming from.

Once I downloaded Minima 2.5.1 to my computer, I could finally see where some of the theme text on my blog originates, and start adding certain base files into the build, making mods as overrides. The theme-as-gem deployment is clever, but also feels like magic at a distance at first.

There’s also the Liquid templating engine to dig into for serious Jekyll development, and scss builds and… here’s where my vision of just enough technology started to fade. Jekyll is actually fairly abmitious and featureful, and really, too much for my needs. Nonetheless, it powers this blog, so we’ll see how we fare with it.