Intro
This post serves to be a test placeholder, but also a good start of a blog post.
I’ve been blogging on posterous for a little bit and I must say that using Jekyll is a pretty refreshing experience. There are quite a few reasons I switched, and I know there are a LOT of resources out there already documenting how to use/switch to Jekyll. I’ll add those below for a reference for anyone curious.
Here are the reasons why I’ve switched to Jekyll.
Complete Control Over my Site
On Posterous custom designs would be a pain in the butt as you would be stuck in a sandbox environment and the hassle of learning any templating would require a bit more work. Yes, it’s still CSS but it’s not quite as natural as building it yourself. Albeit, Jekyll uses a variety of templating languages, but you can customize them yourself and I personally enjoy using Markdown.
The main point is that as a developer, I have a pretty specific use case versus someone who would simply use Tumblr or Posterous for quick blogging, especially given that there are quite a few nice pre-built themes. Furthermore, I’m not quite sure where Posterous was going with spaces.
You get to express your feelings the best in something you’ve created yourself and I think that’s pretty important.
Developer Friendliness
I’m currently writing Markdown in Vim to write a post… ‘nuff said.
But on that note, it’s really good because it fits in to my work flow as a developer. I LOVE editing my text in VIM over any “Rich Text Editor” any day. Furthermore, it can be placed under source control, (i.e. - git).
Want to publish a change? Do a git add, commit and push and you’re set!
Something about that makes my inner nerd happy. :)
Cool Community and Free Hosting and a Quick Gotcha!
It’s open source and you can find it on Github!
Furthermore you can easily deploy it on to your Github pages… for free! Buy a domain name for 10 bucks and you’re all set! Awesome!
If you want a starting point, there are a TON of Jekyll blogs floating on Github and you can give them a fork. Octopress seems to be a popular choice, among others.
One more issue that I ran in to was that I had issues with syntax highlighting. The reason for this was because I was using Liquid 2.3 rather than 2.2. So keep that in mind if you run in to an issue with code highlighting!
Resources
Have I done a good enough job to convince you to give it a try? Well here are some resources that have helped me a lot:
- [Envy Labs Tutorial] (http://blog.envylabs.com/2009/08/publishing-a-blog-with-github-pages-and-jekyll/)
- [NetTuts Tutorial] (http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/building-static-sites-with-jekyll/)
- [Main Page] (http://tom.preston-werner.com/jekyll/)
- [Tom Preston Werner’s Blog] (https://github.com/mojombo/mojombo.github.com)
- [My Blog :)] (https://github.com/jkao/jkao.github.com)
Give them a look and maybe a shout. :)
If you enjoyed my article you can follow me on Twitter @j_ckao or connect with me with my links on the side.