Jekyll In 15 Minutes | Hacker News Reader

Jekyll In 15 Minutes

benhowdle.im

43 pointsbenhowdle8916 comments

And a nice blog framework built on top of it: http://octopress.org/

I just switched from Octopress to vanilla Jekyll. Octopress was a nice way to get started, but it wasn't very long until the reasons Octopress were simple became overly complex. Theme management (the main reason I wanted to use it) was badly implemented, and it had to be pretty hacky in order to deploy to GitHub Pages because of the heavy usage of custom plugins.

Nice post. Despite what others said, there's a place for a quick overview of Jekyll. The Jekyll wiki (which, have they updated it recently? It seems more useful than I remember it), while comprehensive, covers far more information than you need to get up and running. A quickstart guide would have been handy when I was starting.

A couple things that might have been helpful would be to mention how to create new posts (since they have a specific format) and perhaps linking to a barebones deployment of Jekyll that followed along with your post (though you did link to your site, so kudos for that).

Keep on writing. A Jekyll plugin tutorial (as mentioned by ElongatedTowel) would indeed be a useful resource.

Jekyll is great, people should use it, but I wish there was more progress beyond Jekyll.

The thing that kind of blows about Jekyll is you kind of need the local Jekyll environment to build your site. I kind of am starting to get to a point where I want to be able to have some hybrid of a web interface and local dev. Something like using Github's distraction free writing to create the pages, then be able to publish without the local setup.

I guess I should just put a jekyll server in the cloud somewhere...

You can do that if you deploy your Jekyll blog to GitHub Pages (which, why wouldn't you?). Just go into your repo on their web interface, create your post file in distraction free "Zen mode", and commit.

http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/june/25/prose-a-content...

I don't know why this got upvoted. There's nothing new added that you can't find on Jekyll wiki.

If anything a plugin tutorial would be what Jekyll seems to need the most. The small example on the wiki wasn't exactly helpful to me.

I guess if what Jekyll or Octopress provides out of the box they are the best choice at the moment. At least that's probably why they are so incredibly popular.

I started writing my own solution but I realized once you get past a certain point it's actually pretty hard to design something like this. And with the amount of static site generators out there it wouldn't ever have a chance to compete no matter how good it would be.

I wish it was easy to just replace the Liquid templates completely. No template inheritance irks me the most.

I guess that falls into Ruby dev and less Jekyll stuff?

Jekyll was something I've been meaning to try for ages. I never found a getting started section on the wiki and this blog was exactly what I was looking for.

oh please!! then what is this?

http://jekyllrb.com/docs/structure/

Yeah that's a fair point ;) To be honest though I never actually noticed the Getting started section on the right of the screen. I've never visited the site with the intention of building a site with jekyll at that moment so I was just skimming. If all the Getting started section pages were a single long page at http://jekyllrb.com/docs/home/ (like the sinatra docs) then I probably would have noticed them. I realise this is probably ridiculously pedantic though, I'm sure I would have found the information if I was trying to actually get started rather than just get a feel for how it works.

15 minutes? You've put ~20 in the actual guide! Bad form.

I wish there was sth like this for Hyde and/or Pelican. I have tried a lot many times but it just, for some reason or other, fail to take off properly either on my Pi or AWS or WebFaction.

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