While Jekyll is cool to run a blog, it could be a PITA if you want to run a marketing site or something less blog-like with it. This made me to create Punch (http://laktek.github.com/punch), which can be easily customized to run many different kinds of sites.
If you already have a blog based on Jekyll, but feels it takes forever to build. Consider switching it to Punch with this boilerplate (https://github.com/laktek/punch-blog). Basically, you only need to move the files from Jekyll's `_posts` directory to Punch's `posts` directory. Also, you would love the ease in template customizations (and ability to use partial layouts).
My preferred tool for marketing websites is http://middlemanapp.com/ . On top of handling the markdown, erb -> html generation it also takes care of minifying of js and css, handles sass, less and setting image sizes automatically. It's not my project but I really love it :)
I used to be a happy jekyll user for a long time. But, bloggin using jekyll
is frustrating when you have to make a lot of minor edits. The commit → push
dance is too much while making small edits. Also, I don't know a straight way
of doing jekyll redirects and allowing the use of tags/categories.
Substance fixes those issues because it is dynamic I sometimes wonder what age
we are living in, when we (the tech bloggers) use a static site generator for
our blogs. Jekyll's main strength has been that it's very very flexible,
I've tried to build Substance to give the most flexibility to the users
without complicating things.
Substance (http://substancehq.com/) is a simple blogging engine / site builder without any fluff. I created it to replace Jekyll for myself. Hope others find it useful.
Also, it has ability to add custom data collections easily. If you want to build a simple site, this comes in very handy.
If you keep your Jekyll site on GitHub, you can edit your site in your browser with Prose. I imagine you use GitHub for its Jekyll building and mirror the built site elsewhere.
Yes, it is a hosted blogging engine. You can sign up and use it with a single click. Just enter a blog title on the home page form and hit the 'create blog' button, that's all.
I don't understand why "decrease build time" receives such emphasis; isn't build time largely irrelevant to the type of sites that are appropriate for a static site generator?
"Build time" means "generation time", or "compile time". It's the amount of time it takes Jekyll to build the site from the source to the static HTML, etc. Right now, it's really slow. If you have over 100 posts, it practically warrants a coffee break. We have some developed some ideas about fixing this issue.
This, 1000x times. I have over 1200 posts on my blog http://paulstamatiou.com and I've purposefully avoided stuff like pagination, related posts (lsi) at the end of articles, tags/category pages and other features due to slow time. I'm at about 60s on my Macbook Air now which I can deal with.
But when I'm writing a blog post and I constantly want to preview it in the browser (since lots of my posts have images and such I prefer seeing the real layout than purely in sublime text 2) I use a rake task I have that stashes every post but the one I'm working on so it only generates the one post.
Edit: and a faster generation time means I don't have to feel bad using lots of liquid filters / includes (which can help clean things up and organize my site).
Two things I'd like to see (which I've had to fork my jekyll for) and that I'll put on the github:
- "multiviews" support (it's how I get all my links to have no .html ending, well that and some rack:rewrite rules)
- support for different post types that are not in the main site.posts. I only have 2 types now but for a while had a regular post, a shorter "aside" style post that was not in the main feed nor homepage and had its own index and feed, and another post type for photos. These go beyond just different layouts. Though this is more of a CMS feature than a blog feature which may be a direction thing that Jekyll is not intended for. ?
I read parkr's above comment and was about to search for your blog (where I first read about the insane site generation times), but then I found your comment just below. :)
If I update just one post, can't we just recompile that? If a layout is changed, then all non-static files would be regenerated. There's a way to be more specific.
For me it is the single biggest feature addition. Just changing one file would require rebuilding the entire site in Jekyll. Something similar to a Makefile should be in place, which can track dependencies and rebuild only the affected files.
It's static only relative to the output. You can readily write dependencies between your source (mdown, partials, whatever) files, just like your binaries/libraries depend on .o files, which themselves depend on .c and .h.
I fail to see how changing a typo in an article's content would require the whole thing to be rebuilt. Even adding a page would not require rebuilding every single page unless the new page appeared in a global navigation. Building the dependency graph automatically could even turn out to be not that hard.
I am a Python programmer yet Jekyll is still my preferred static blog generator. I strongly considered Pelican but did not like all the magic it came with. Pelican would consolidate all my blog posts to the same location and had various (configurable) directory conventions that I would've to follow.
I needed just a simple compiler which converts markdown to html while retaining the structure of the site. Ideally, what need not be processed should be left as is. This gives developers like me a lot of flexibility to design a site.
Jekyll has not been updated for a long time but it still serves my needs quite well. I hope future releases would support minification and preprocessors like Coffeescript.
I've only recently heard of jekyll but have been searching or thinking about creating a markdown based blog for a while. I first discovered it through an article on the obama campaign, and how they used it in combination with AWS:S3 http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio.... Jekyll is here to stay.
I'm curious. Setting things like this up is my idea of fun. I use the same technique for my business. I like static site hosting, and liked the idea of things being speedy no matter where our customers are. Cloudfront does that well.
As far as cost. I'm 30 and I don't like relying on free things. Github probably wont go down, but I'd still rather pay. I set that up Dec 1st, served 100k pageviews. My Amazon bill right now is $1.25 (one dollar, twenty five cents). Maybe that'll go up, but for what I'm doing, I doubt it will be that expensive.
I've run a Jekyll site from S3 with no difficulty, at a satisfactorily low hosting cost. Cloudfront takes only minutes to setup, and the costs are competitive, so I imagine it's a promising route.
I can't program worth a lick in ruby or any other language (I'm somewhat proficient at copy & pasting jquery snippets). I had very little trouble installing it and once it's running, it's great. I basically only use it for simple includes, blog list pages and SASS.
I'm a Perl guy and don't know Ruby. Jekyll is excellent, but I ended up going with http://ruhoh.com which is based on (forked from?) Jekyll. That worked great. Ruhoh is sort of language agnostic. My biggest hurdle was grokking Mustache.
On a side note, I also had a problem with the RSS generator. I managed to submit a patch for my problem. I was pleased to discover Ruby is so Perlish! I guess thats obvious given that a lot of Ruby is inspired by Perl. I suspect switching back and forth between the two would not be hard.
As a non-ruby dev, I found it a bit heavy to try dig in to and understand full, so I ended up starting writing my own https://github.com/tanepiper/nell - it's an interesting problem to solve though.
Funnily enough, the biggest problem I had with Jekyll is lack of Python knowledge (Pygments.rb is a wrapper around a Python syntax hightlighter, and everything stopped working at some stage when OS X got confused about Python versions).
If you already have a blog based on Jekyll, but feels it takes forever to build. Consider switching it to Punch with this boilerplate (https://github.com/laktek/punch-blog). Basically, you only need to move the files from Jekyll's `_posts` directory to Punch's `posts` directory. Also, you would love the ease in template customizations (and ability to use partial layouts).