Building A Website Or Blog With Jekyll

Plugin updates, paid hosting, MySQL databases, hacking PHP, and settings buried deep in the admin panel. These are just a few of the common pain points many users experience with Wordpress. For anyone maintaining a small, personal website or blog, Wordpress is overkill. And while it's extremely versatile in many respects, it's not simple.

After years of using Wordpress for my own websites and projects, I was intrigued when I came across Jekyll. It's a static site generator that takes your plain text and builds your site, ready for deployment. For developers using Jekyll, editing HTML, CSS, and default templates is easy and accessible. For beginners, an entire website can be built and launched with only basic knowledge of Github and HTML/CSS.

Github Pages is nicely integrated with Jekyll. It's easy to set up, and documentation is plentiful. It's simple, and hosting is free.

With this in mind, my switch to Jekyll for this website makes sense (as of original publishing date 2017-06-01). It's a great alternative to a bulky Wordpress setup, and allows complete and straigtforward customization, as well as templated headers and footers for streamlined page and post creation.

Jekyll's Quick-Start Instructions

To quickly get started with Jekyll, run the following commands in your terminal.

~ $ gem install bundler jekyll
~ $ jekyll new my-awesome-site
~ $ cd my-awesome-site
~/my-awesome-site $ bundle exec jekyll serve
# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

More detailed instructions can be found in the official Jekyll documentation.