Googling on the topic should lead you to tutorials on how to get your jekyll powered blog up in minutes. jekyll bootstrap will even give you a custom script to make deployment easier. This nettuts article could be your first read about jekyll. The official docs and octopress give more idea. So here I’m going a bit against my first post. More philosophy and less code.
jekyll is originally by Tom Preston-Werner aka mojombo. You can read his blogs here. Out of all of the posts, blogging like a hacker talks about the inception of jekyll.
I have always felt something similar about blogging but never ever thought I could write something like this bottom up. I’d like to share here why I moved to something like this from the traditional blogging engines.
When I felt like writing, I wanted to concentrate on my content and not on the style or presentation. When I designed, I dint want to go to 10 blog posts and edit CSS classes there. I wanted to separate them out, because content and presentation are two different things they just don’t go well together. jekyll provides enough tools to do this very efficiently. Octopress adds sugar on top of jekyll and gives you a default template, loads of extra plugins and it makes the first jump into something like this less troublesome. This was important to me. I might move my blog to some other platform someday and I want the transition to be smooth. Posts can be written in a standard format, mardkown. You can read more about it here, and here and here. It gives me the freedom to express things exactly the way I wanted it. In a way it reminds me of stuff like MVC architecture, though they are quite different.
I feel so insecure when I write content or code and don’t track it with git. I wanted my data or code to be safe even if my laptop crashed midway a sentence. Its pretty usual for me to push to github per commit. I learned git about 2 years back. Thanks to @Noufal Ibrahim. Though it was quite a pain to pick it up, I gradually fell in love with git. Thanks to .netrc file which will let me push through firewalls like that of NITC allowing only port 80, 443 etc without typing passwords again and again. Im gonna write a lot about git in the future I guess. I could track my blog posts as plain text files, VC it with git and make sure that I exactly know when and how some content posted up on the internet on my name changed and react to it. I cant imagine this on blogger. Here I trust SHA1 security of git and Linus Torvalds over the blogger servers run by Google.
Forgetting all the uber geek stuff, finally jekyll will output a static site to _site folder, which you should be able to deploy to any web server in the world easily. github adds a bit spice and you can directly push the jekyll code and it will deal the rest. (Tom Preston-Werner aka mojombo is a githubber). I am not sure how well it will fit somebody else’s needs, but this feels like the right tool for me. Ping me for any help and I will be happy to do so :)
As Tom says,
I’ve been living with Jekyll for just over a month now. I love it. Driving the development of Jekyll based on the needs of my blog has been very rewarding. I can edit my posts in TextMate, giving me automatic and competent spell checking. I have immediate and first class access to the CSS and page templates. Everything is backed up on GitHub. I feel a lightness now when I’m writing a post. The system is simple enough that I can keep the entire conversion process in my head. The distance from my brain to my blog has shrunk, and, in the end, I think that will make me a better author.
UPDATE : I just added disqus comments to my blog and this is how I did it.
- Get your disqus code and insert it into something like
_includes/disqus.extcommit- Conditionally include it to your post layout commit
- Make it look good with too less css commit