New Year, New Platform
I have just finished setting up my personal site with Jekyll! Hooray!!
Why Jekyll? For me, it is because it gives me complete control over the layout and style of the whole site. I also got to host it on Github with git, which is both free and convenient. The customization is way better than Blogspot and much easier to learn. While people describe it as ‘blogging like a hacker’, I found that I don’t really need to be that hard-core in order to use it. In fact, I know nothing about Ruby and only started to learn about git when I need to deploy my site.
Building sites with Jekyll also provides a better way of handling data-I have a copy of the site both in my computer and on the Github website. And using Disqus seems to be a better option, with its integration with social networking sites and the possibility to easily port comments to other sites.
The only things I don’t like about Jekyll are:
- Once I use plugins, I can’t use Github to generate the site. Plugins are quite important if I want to have more blogging features like pages for tags and archives etc., but for security issues, it’s impossible for Github to enable plugins ._. This isn’t Github’s fault of course, but it’s just annoying. Maybe I should try to get my own server.
- This is more personal: Since websites generated by Jekyll are static, there are bound to be many repeated contents-navigation bars, sitebars, the stuff in the head tag etc. It just makes me feel rather uncomfortable.
Still, Jekyll is by far the best website engine I have seen-it’s flexible, fast, and easy to learn, debug and setup.