I had been thinking to start a blog for a long time and have made a few failed attempts in the past with wordpress and blogspot. The main reason behind the failure in my past attemps has been my discomfort in using the popular blogging platforms. They somehow do not feel right and I find them cumbersome, bloated and difficult to customize. Further, I always felt that my content would be stuck on the platform and that it would be difficult to migrate elsewhere in future.

Recently, I came across Andrej Karpathy’s blog post Switching Blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. Jekyll is exactly what I needed. So, I finally decided to give it a shot this new year.

Jekyll is a tool to transform plain text into static websites and blogs. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server. Jekyll also happens to be the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use Jekyll to host your project’s page, blog, or website from GitHub’s servers for free.

What’s more? It was originally started by Github’s co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and is open source. With more than 18,000 stargazers and 400 contributors on Github, you can expect to get the best bang for the buck. Advantages of using Jekyll:

  • Simple : No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install - just your content.
  • Static : Markdown (or Textile), Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment.
  • Blog-aware : Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.

Further, it is really easy to tweak. I added Google Analytics tracking code and Disqus comments support by just adding a few lines of code in the appropriate templates.

I would highly recommend it to anyone. Checkout the official website for more info and tutorials.