How I built my blog in one day
erjjones.github.com
erjjones.github.com
I think this is a neat collection of frontend tools to make your Jekyll (or other static) blog snazzy. It's a good article in that respect: "Here are all the tools you need for a full featured Jekyll blog." But making the point of it being a "fast setup", as someone else pointed out, is a weak point, since wordpress and others are just as fast or faster.
Straight up default bootstrap is even worse in my eyes than craigslist style css. It's overused, and it's not enough to impress anymore. Take 6 more days, talk to a designer, and make this a real blog.
That said, this particular sort of design where it's not a standard blog theme and not a custom design, but is just tweaked Bootstrap just seems neither here nor there.
I think most readers would be OK seeing something looking bootstrappy, but not with something that is pure unmodified boostrap.
If the blog will be targeted towards more savvy tech folk like yourself, then I kinda see your point. If it's not going to speak to that niche then I say go forth with bootstrap!
edit: and I'm sure he'll customize as he goes.
Even if he did want to do his blog in "craigslist style css"... Why do you care?
Nope. It can also mean "Look how easy it is to get started". That was my interpretation.
I was vaguely hoping the article was going to be about a mindhack for getting out fast blog posts. I can create the blog layout in 10 minutes, but the content is much more difficult sometimes.
If you click on the link, you'll see that it's a project that is not there to promote the submitter nor stroke their ego, but to help other people simplify something many find to be tedious and difficult - and in an incredibly well-presented way.
I know about the Twitter Bootstrap like everyone and their dog, but I only see articles of praise rather than articles that praise by showing instead of telling through a guide and demonstrating the result in the form of the site itself.
Well done. This is the best article I have seen on Twitter Bootstrap.
I think a reason Jekyll is popular is because it's relatively simple to update & use once it's running. Since it's also just static HTML via your web-server, it's also significantly more secure (no app code to exploit).
That, and it's fast. Serve it with nginx and you'll endure traffic magnitudes larger than even a tweaked WP install can on a small VPS.
Jekyll is also much easier to maintain, with it's built in web server for testing, and static page generation, using a github repo is so simple it's stupid.
Jekyll is the way to go.
That's quite the over-generalization.
Update with wordpress is a click-away.
I've seen much difference between two when it comes to maintaing, having to touch databases etc.
Sure, Jekyll sounds like a more efficient solution, but most people don't have a "pain" point when running WordPress - at least not one that can't be solved with a plugin. (Most people)
I would have to agree with you. Now, as far as satisfying the craving... lately I've wanted to try Jekyll and serve the site from Amazon S3 + Cloudfront. Seems to me it would handle a tremendous amount of traffic and be very fast.
Now, if only I had content that a few million people wanted to read...
A blog is about producing and publishing content. It's not thinking about scaling when there's absolutely no need for it. If one has something worthwhile to say, then spending anything more than 5 minutes to setup a blog is just a waste of time.
That's almost like having an important meeting to get to, but taking a few weeks to reinvent the wheel just so you can get there.
I would say Cloudfront is actually overkill for a static site, I didn't really notice any decreased page load times in my testing, and having it purge the caches is another hoop you have to jump through.
There is something entirely geeky about it though, and it puts a smile on my face knowing how unnecessary the technology behind my site is.
I'd be willing to share my rakefiles for publishing this set up if anyone is interested.
There is obviously a lot to say about static blogs in general, but this is by far the upside I am most content with.
On the flip-side, figuring out how to enable gzipping and having to use a www. subdomain are nuisances people setting up their blog on Wordpress won't have to bother with - at least on a number of Wordpress hosts.
Sat down with Go, wrote a web handler (they already have http support). Added code to parse a tree of directories containing blog posts. Write markdown code in individual files in those directories. Blog code reads the markdown, parses it, and inserts it into a template. Add Disqus to taste and serve.
Final step: don't submit it to hacker news, profit :)
It's not as nice as it could be, but I'm pretty happy with how it works.
do it right, nobody gives a shit how fast you achieved mediocrity
On the other hand, the dynamic Repo/Followers count was a nice touch. Didn't know about that one.
what is your draft management workflow like? this is important to me too, more important in fact than optimizing for people to actually read the blog, because if draft management sucks then i don't blog enough to get readers.
I've been writing on a github pages-based blog and I dump all draft blog posts into a _wip folder. They get version controlled like any other file and I can add the YAML and move them into the _posts folder when I'm ready to publish.
Edit: Since I've been posting on that blog, I've decided to move my personal one to GitHub pages too. When posting is as simple as pushing a file it becomes easier to focus on writing. The only reasons I haven't switched are (1) extracting content from my old provider and (2) theming and set up for the new one.
I just use plain text files and my current editor of choice is Sublime Text 2 (really like the full screen mode). I write in markdown and if I really want to 'preview' it I open a copy of the file in Coda, where Ive installed a plugin for this purpose. That's pretty much all I need.
The remaining barriers to writing are non-technical (e.g. time, will, etc)
Make sure you don't get the latest version from GitHub, but easy_install it and build from simple_blog.
1. git clone git://github.com/erjjones/erjjones.github.com.git 2. Delete posts, write posts, push to your own repo.