Finally Found Jekyll

This will likely be the first post in a series about the Jekyll, blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby.

I've been looking for a blogging vehicle for quite some time now. Nothing has been able to fit my needs. Fortunately for me I just found Jekyll! This is exactly what I've needed! Ultimately, I've been looking for a platform that would fit the following:

1. Use Markdown to write all post content.
2. Minimal, preferably no, design required at initial deployment.
3. Concentrate on content, not blog plugin management or web framework.

Jekyll hits the nail on the head in all these categories. I was amazed to find that it had just what I needed.

A friend of mine that does a lot of Linux/Embedded Linux consulting Cliff Brake first pointed me in the way of blacksmith. He's such an incredible engineer that I took his advice hook line and sinker.

I went off installing node.js on my laptop and VPS to start the ball rolling. I found that it did not appear to run as advertised on my machine. Knowing that it was clearly something on my end since it would appear that many people are using blacksmith without any difficulty I started to look at where I had gone wrong. It seems that node prefers to be installed in /usr/local/ and not by root. Undaunted, I began to correct my errors and continued on the node.js course.

One of the features I really was impressed with is the whole idea of "statically generated" websites on the server end. This allows the server to serve up static files like it's 1995 baby! Screaming fast HTML on demand.

This makes a lot of sense to me, likely because I've spent a lot of time working with Simulink and its code generation. When integrating existing C source code with Simulink generated code one often uses Target Language Compiler, or TLC code to allow Simulink and C to play together. The TLC acts like a preprocessor on steroids, as my colleage puts it, creating marvelously simple interfaces and fast execution. Only code that is required for an application is generated. Many conditional checks are avoided because the decision of what should be in the code is made at compile time, not run time. This is a great benefit, one which is made possible through a feature rich preprocessor, if I may use that term, like TLC. Seems to me that C is missing that feature, maybe it can be addressed someday. Thus, I desired the same kind of decision making at "compile time" for a website, knowing that performance is a critical factor in success for any web based application.

However, I could not seem to get blacksmith under control, so I turned to its cousin, wintersmith. Again, I found it was not as easy to run as I first had hoped. I was beginning to become discouraged and feared I would return to the Wordpress disaster that I had left behind. Then, I called to remembrance the complete failure that I had with Wordpress and kept searching, until I found Jekyll. I need to get some feedback from Cliff his recomendation, I'm certain it was a good one and ultimately did lead me out of the Wordpress wasteland. However, my Wordpress woes were not a function of the actual Wordpress engine, but of how I prefer to work and deliver content. It appears to be orthogonal to how Wordpress authors operate. I'd rather put some text in an editor and dress it up with Markdown that tangle with some WYSIWYG Content Management System, to each his own!

Jekyll, as far as I'm concerned, is extremely easy to run and administer. Another huge benefit is that Github has opened up a service where a user may have their Jekyll blog hosted free on github. The content of each blog is often then open sourced in github. Now the content can be forked, cloned, etc. This is the solution for me! I search around and found a very well designed site by Garry Welding. I cloned it, made some minor customizations and now have this blog! Outstanding! Of course, you can find the source at github. I would recommend any interested persons follow his blog post to get it straight from the source. In one fell swoop you get tag support(not standard with Jekyll), bootstrap integration, and a host of other nicities and eye candy. Enjoy!

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