A Fresh Start with Jekyll

I’ve been meaning to do a revamp of my old site, and took that as a chance to try Jekyll. The decisions to use Jekyll over Wordpress, which I’ve been relying upon over the past 3 years, revolve around the following:

• Flexibility. It can easily be deployed in any machine. The fact that the whole site is only composed of static pages avoids the maintenance of extra software on the server side and allows me to focus simply on the content.
• Control. I have full control over the content: how the pages are displayed, how the content is linked, how the titles, urls and everything is formatted. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be able to do this with a plaform like Wordpress, but with Jekyll everything is explicit.
• Enhances a familiar workflow. Writing with Jekyll is closer to a workflow that I’m used to as a software developer. I can keep all content versioned in a local git repository and push to a remote repository when I’m ready to publish. Moreover, I can write the posts using Markdown directly on Emacs, using a familiar syntax and avoiding HTML.
• Simplicity. Having only static files makes scaling easier and improves security.

It’s surprisingly easy to get started with Jekyll. Having already ruby and rvm in my system, I just needed to install the gem, setup the initial project structure as described in its wiki and start working on the site design and initial structure. Since Jekyll supports direct regeneration, I don’t need to restart the local server to see my changes in the browser. To support syntax highlighting, I installed Pygments (which is the same software GitHub uses for syntax highlighting) and had it generate its css.

I wanted to keep the site design as simple as possible. Lacking proper design skills, I grabbed a few ideas from Tom Preston-Werner, a few fonts from Google Web Fonts and came up with the current state, which I have only tested in Chrome and Safari, but whose simplicity of the CSS makes me believe that it should be consistent across different browsers.

Since obviously Jekyll doesn’t support comments out of the box, I signed up for Disqus and had it set up on my posts’ page. This was also surprisingly easy.

What about the old posts?

Even though there are various ways to import posts from my old blog to the new platform, I figured I would have a tough time with formatting issues. So, for now, I’m keeping everything under the /old/ subdirectory. This also means that the RSS feed URL has also changed, so grab the new one here.