Jekyll Is Awesome

I’ve tried Wordpress. I’ve tried just writing HTML and glueing it all together using javascript. Installing Wordpress is tough, and all that PHP makes life difficult. Writting HTML and using javascript to dynamically load parts of the page seems like a good idea on paper, but in practice it makes the entire webpage load in a couple seconds, popping in and rearranging the page the entire time. In short, writting webpages is hard.

Jekyll, a program which parses a bunch of easy-to-write template files and HTML and Markdown into a static site, makes it easier. Maintaining and updating my site has become a breeze since I implemented Jekyll. It took surprising little effort to convert my previously-dynamically-loaded content to Jekyll _includes. Moreover, I can (and have) automated parts of my site; for example, the ‘projects’ submenu in the navbar is generated from the files in the _projects folder. I’m writing this blog post in Markdown; Jekyll will convert and format it as HTML.

This is awesome. My site is awesome. Jekyll is awesome.