Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a big fan of Jekyll. I've been using it for ~5 years and just made a new site with it recently so I would still use it today.

I currently use it for:

- My personal blog with 250+ posts and tons of pages[0]

- A podcast platform[1] which is open source[2]

- The landing pages for all of my web development courses (not going to bother linking them since I don't want to seem like I'm fishing HN for sales)

I also recently wrote about my whole site's tech stack here[3]. That post might not fully apply to you since you want to host it on S3. I personally self host everything on DigitalOcean but using S3 wouldn't be a problem.

You mentioned "static assets" and this is where Jekyll shines IMO. The jekyll-assets plugin (optional) will md5 tag your assets for cache busting and bundle your scss / JS too. It's really handy and avoids having to set up more complicated tools. It pretty much works out of the box with close to zero configuration.

The plugin system is nice too. You can do some really useful things like automatically add certain rel attributes to external links with a few dozen lines of Ruby. It's very handy for a blog.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/

[1]: https://runninginproduction.com/

[2]: https://github.com/nickjj/runninginproduction.com

[3]: https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/1-100k-page-views...

I’d second Jekyll because it’s easy to get hosted on GitHub pages with a custom domain, or just a .io default. A no-brainer for low maintenance pages with easy Markdown updates in my opinion. Also nice to know it will be supported by that group since it powers so many pages.

The markdown authoring experience is also one that I really love, personally, which is an added bonus.

Isn't Jekyll slow for a lot of blog posts? Also,adding all those plugins for everything must slow it down. Asking you since you have 250+ posts. I had read this in a Hugo vs Jekyll comparison and picked Hugo.

Btw, checkout https://www.stackbit.com/. really good.

> Isn't Jekyll slow for a lot of blog posts?

I haven't noticed it, otherwise I would have for sure switched by now. I have zero patience for slow downs like that.

I think it's only really slow if you make questionable decisions at the template level around tagging, categories and pagination where you could end up with deeply nested loops but you can avoid all of those problems without making compromises.

For every day writing, I run Jekyll with --incremental. Basically what this translates to is I can have my editor open and write a blog post with a browser next to it and every time I save the file it takes around 3-4 full seconds to auto-reload and see a live preview. Using --incremental only incrementally rebuilds what changed instead of everything.

This is in an absolute total worst case scenario environment too where I'm running Ruby directly inside of WSL1 and the code is mounted in from a non-SSD using an i5 3.2ghz quad core from 5 years ago. When WSL2 hits I wouldn't be surprised if it finishes in 1-2 seconds (or if you had MacOS / Linux now it would be faster too).

For builds (at deploy time) it takes around 20-30 seconds for Jekyll to create what it needs to create and push everything to my server using Ansible. This delay doesn't bother me because I run 1 command and let it do its thing while I do something else. I only run this a few times a week at most too.

Realistically 250+ posts isn't a ton but for a solo blogger it's sort of a decent amount. That was ~5 years worth of posting consistently.

But I think --incremental will save you no matter how big it gets for writing where you want a fast feedback loop.

Your blog and content look great! What theme are you using for Jekyll?

Thank you.

I'm not using any Jekyll specific theme.

I started with a Bootstrap 3.x base and custom made it. I would have used Bootstrap 4.x but it wasn't out at the time.

When coming up with the design the main focus I had in mind was "minimal and readable".

I converted an extremely large marketing/news site of 5000+ articles (and growing) to Jekyll from Wordpress. Lots of custom-built plugins. Total build & deploy time start to finish is around 20 minutes, but about half of that is webpack doing its thing. I think the team responsible after I left has been able to speed things up to about 5 minutes, but can't confirm.

I've built a ton using both Jekyll and Hugo, and while that later is speedy, its templating is extremely inflexible. The more complicated your content and the things you try to do with it, the more grim things look for it.

Jekyll has nicer templating, but when you work on large website, Hugo is just much faster.

Bootstrap team is moving their docs to Hugo: https://blog.getbootstrap.com/2019/02/11/bootstrap-4-3-0/#br...

I thought my post made it clear that I was both aware of that and built one of the largest Jekyll sites on the internet.

I'd link the damn thing but I don't want to dox myself.

I was agreeing with you.

Fair enough. Mea culpa.

I do want to stress though that in that case, Hugo's speed wasn't a positive enough tradeoff vs worse templating to switch.

We used both on a case by case basis there. A few dozen online properties. Hugo got used on the simplest stuff, often 4-5 page lead generation sites which is about 30% of what that company did. Speed of builds/deployment is basically the same there, but with Hugo the tooling/pipeline was much simpler.

We have a newspaper with close to 1000 articles running on Jekyll. Site generation speed is low, but acceptable.

> https://www.stackbit.com/

What's the pricing for this? There's no mention on the website

Hey, Stackbit founder here. Creating websites with Stackbit is and will continue being free. It has a low cost of operation for us and we find its an attractive way for people to experiment with static sites / the JAMstack.

A request. All those new upcoming Themes. Could you at least make a video demo of them(in case they're somewhat ready) if not the date of their release, so that I keep them in mind and wait for them? Hoping for a Christmas release

Stackbit is awesome. I would love to see support for WordPress in the list of CMSs.

we need more tmux videos from you.

I liked Middleman. It seems like a more powerful Jekyll.

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