Jekyll

in Front-end

A quick introduction to what is Jekyll. This blog is build using Jekyll and hosted on github pages.

What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator written in Ruby. It takes raw text files written in Markdown, Liquid, or HTML, and transforms them into a static website or blog. With Jekyll, you don’t need to worry about databases or server-side programming, and the output is a fast, secure, and easily deployable website.

The Discovery

I first came across Jekyll when I was looking for an alternative to WordPress. I wanted a simple, fast, and secure website without the overhead of a database. After doing some research, I stumbled upon static site generators and quickly zeroed in on Jekyll. Its simplicity, flexibility, and growing community convinced me to give it a shot.

Setting Up Jekyll

Getting started with Jekyll was surprisingly easy. Once I had Ruby and RubyGems installed, it was just a matter of running a few commands to install Jekyll and create a new project:

gem install jekyll bundler
jekyll new my-awesome-site
cd my-awesome-site
bundle exec jekyll serve

And voila! Jekyll was up and running locally, serving my new website at http://localhost:4000.

Jekyll’s Features

As I dove deeper into Jekyll, I discovered some features that have made my life as a developer much easier:

  1. Markdown support: Jekyll allows you to write your content in Markdown, which makes it incredibly easy to format text, add images, and create links.

  2. Liquid templating: Jekyll uses the powerful Liquid templating engine, which enables you to create dynamic content, loops, and conditionals without the need for server-side programming.

  3. Sass/SCSS support: Jekyll has built-in support for Sass and SCSS, making it easy to write clean, maintainable, and modular CSS.

  4. Custom collections: Jekyll lets you create custom collections to store and manage any type of content, not just blog posts, allowing for greater flexibility in your site structure.

  5. Plugins: Jekyll’s extensible plugin system allows you to add functionality like pagination, SEO optimization, and image optimization without much hassle.

  6. GitHub Pages integration: Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which makes deploying your site to a custom domain a breeze.

Embracing Jekyll

Since discovering Jekyll, I’ve used it to build this blog and several websites, and the results have been fantastic. The speed, security that come with static sites and the simplicity and flexibility of working with Jekyll has made it an indispensable tool in my web development arsenal.

If you’re a web developer looking for an alternative to traditional content management systems, I highly recommend giving Jekyll a try.