Sam's space

Experimenting with Jekyll, a popular static site generator, handy for a simple blog hosted on Github Pages. So far I like it!

While you do have to touch the command line at some point later on, using Jekyll is much easier to carry out than building a blog from scratch (assuming you are not using a ready-to-use blogging platform). The easiest way to try it is to follow the excellent docs at Jekyll Now, created by Barry Clark, or read his detailed article at the Smashing Magazine.

Some of the aspects I already like:

• You can write posts in Markdown, and don’t waste time with the layout or HTML tags.
• Posts can be gathered into collections, which can be used to automatically generate different layouts for different types of content.
• The look-and-feel can be easily customized with your own CSS.
• The default HTML skeleton is usable, but you can also modify it as you wish.
• Custom Javascript can be incorporated as well.
• The Liquid templating engine can be strange at first, but it can be used to.