Why I'm Using Jekyll to Run my Blog
My former blog was built with Wordpress. While Wordpress offers a reasonable solution for some people and some projects, it simply doesn’t match my needs. I don’t like working with a WYSIWYG editor. I don’t want comments on my posts. And I don’t need anyone but myself to have any ability to write or manage the content. Wordpress also introduces potential security vulnerabilities, which can be mitigated by regular updating, but that’s just another maintenance piece I’d rather not have.
Enter Jekyll
A few people (especially one friend in particular) have recommended Jekyll to me. It’s a popular static website/blog generator (there are others), a relatively simple tool that most web developers can learn quickly. In a nutshell, it works by allowing you to create HTML templates and then author posts with Markdown. Jekyll converts everything to static HTML and then you upload the generated files and serve.
Simple. No database. No web login and CMS to navigate. No WYSIWYG. No comments to moderate.
Because the site is static, you can host it nearly anywhere, including an Amazon S3 bucket. The static site loads faster because there is no PHP to be parsed, no database queries, and the payload is likely smaller than Wordpress or many blogging applications would be out-of-the-box.
Now I get to write my blog posts in my favorite text editor and it’s fun!