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Comment by jimmytucson | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who doesn't know Ruby (like, at all) tried using Jekyll? How was your experience?

I've wanted to for a while but I feel somewhat handicapped not knowing Ruby so I've been putzing around Python-based alternatives like Pelican.

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Using Jekyllwothout any ruby experience should be a snap. It's all controlled by the CLI. You create posts and run `jekyll` and you're in business.

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).

Another non-Rubyer here, love Jekyll. Vastly better than Wordpress which I was using before, even though I know more PHP than Ruby.

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