To both speed up and simplify this site’s maintenance I’ve gotten rid of traditional CMS; I now use Jekyll: a static site generator. You should give it a try if you’re not afraid of a little hacking.
About Jekyll
Jekyll generates static HTML pages for you. The project’s author, Tom Preston-Werner, has written a nice introduction to Jekyll, but it comes down to this:
- Create some text files that will be your pages and blog posts.
- Create an HTML lay-out file that defines headers and footers for your pages.
- Run Jekyll to combine your text files and lay-out to a website.
- Upload your files to your server for the world to see.
If it sounds easy, that’s because it is. I can use my favourite text editor and version control system to write my posts, and then I let Jekyll use Markdown to turn my files into HTML. You can also use other filters, or write plain HTML.
Let me stress my point: I can use my favorite text editor and versioning
system for my blog, rather than some wimpy <textarea>.
Here comes trouble
Jekyll doesn’t do a lot, by design. Some manual labour is involved, which is to be automated – because we don’t like manual labour, now do we? I’ve written about some of my scripts to enhance Jekyll in separate posts:
Publication process
I have included all these snippets, and some others, in one big Rakefile in my
project directory. Whenever I am ready to publish my site to my server I can
simply call rake publish and it will let Jekyll re-generate my site, upload
all the files to the server and ping Google about my new sitemap.
The actual source code to my site is shared publicly at Github, so you can check out my collection of tasks.
Issues unresolved
First, since my entire website is now just static HTML it is no longer possible to have comments on my site, unless I would use something like Disqus. I’m fine without comments. Second, since Jekyll is Ruby gem, writing more Ruby to add functionality to the website is easy – but actually getting it in there is a little harder. Jekyll lacks a neat plug-in solution. Luckily it’s easy to fork Jekyll on Github and hack away. Thirdly, setting up archive pages, searching, RSS syndication, tagging and post browsing take some manual labour, but for now I’m fine without them. Jekyll is certainly not suited for everyone, but for simple sites it works fine.
Conclusion
Jekyll makes creating and maintaining websites fun, in a geeky kind of way. I love the control it gives me. Tom Preston-Werner writes:
The distance from my brain to my blog has shrunk, and, in the end, I think that will make me a better author.
I couldn’t agree more.
