I am impressed with the Jekyll setup with Github pages. It plays to a lot of my strengths to be able to edit posts directly in whatever text editor I want to and to make changes live with a simple git push.

I will leave this intro post on here as a marker point for when I transferred this over. I was able to import a few of my posts from Tumblr without too much trouble so there is a little bit of pre-history on here.

Static sites like this make a lot of sense for simple portfolio and personal web sites. The main alternative would be a Wordpress site which I have reached for a LOT in the past but this seems better. Wordpress has a tendency to become very slow and bloated fast for the simplest of sites so I don’t know why I haven’t thought to use a static site sooner.

Resuming Jekyll generated content:

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll’s dedicated Help repository.