Jekyll was something I was told about from a friend of mine from College, James Black, and appealed to me for a few reasons. The increased security, lack of databases and lack of updates all appealed. My recent love affair with git makes having everything in text files quite attractive and coding in vim is always better. But my main reason for exploring this was the ease of customising behaviour without the wordpress framework monolith looming over you.
So, here I am with a working website. It wasn’t that bad really once I had ruby and rubygem running. I am running ubuntu on this machine (14.04 with bugs since updating from 12.04) and one of the things that tripped me for a while was that jekyll exists on the debian package repository but it is way out of date (v0.11). I was also having trouble using ‘gem install’ as per the jekyll installation instructions because I had not installed the ruby development package.
Then it’s quite straight forward to make a site:
This is pretty plain though and so I found a set of templates here and went with Wangana, compliments to the developer Nii Adjetey Sowah who kindly offered the MIT License. I downloaded this and, after some faffing trying to keep some of the content I spent five minutes making on the vanilla site, followed his instructions to use ‘bundler’:
It does look like there is a watch function that will automatically build and serve the website when changes are made but I haven’t learnt the extent of this behaviour and so have not started using it yet.
So now I have a very attractive website and just need to fill it with content.
Posted Saturday 4 October 2014 Share