Building a blog with Jekill

Static content generated by Jekyll. This is how you do it.

Why?

I want to keep record of solutions, code and personal projects. Also I want to share photographies and thoughts now and then.

How?

Well, this is the interesting part. As a geek and lover of exotic technologies I would not take the easy way using tumblr, blogger or wordpress. I want to do something cool!

So I started looking into this “new” trend of making your site/blog without a CMS only with static content.

I’ve found jekyll and I fell in love instantly. As a Ruby lover that was perfect. Writing your posts with Markdown is amazing, and everything is so incredibly lightweight! (I can blog even from vim!)

The process is simple as described in the front page of jekyll site, you just need to install the jekyll gem:

 $ gem install jekyll

Create a new site:

 $ jekyll new sitename

Configure editing _config.yml and add posts to the _posts folder!

Executing:

 $ jekyll build --watch

The static content of your blog will be built on a folder called _site every time you make a modification.

Now, as a design geek I wanted a nice theme to my blog, so I went to jekyll themes and checked one by one. There are impressive designs and I would like to create my own template when I get a chance, but for now and as a quick way to start I liked the theme So Simple. It may look simple on the surface, but has a lot of work under the hood. Integrations and social buttons everywhere, a Medium-esque design full of white space and to top it of: responsive.

I forked it and followed the instructions, just did a quick tweak with the pictures (I want to use my own) and a few details more, the theme is perfect and the license is GPL2 so you can tweak it at will.

Where?

Well, this is a static blog so I could host it in Geocities if I wanted to ;P. No need for databases or even any sort of server side language, just an http server does the trick. So I’m using Dreamhost, I have a shared hosting account for a long time now and it seems to work well with static content.