Fun Jekyll Tricks | Hacker News Reader

Fun Jekyll Tricks

madebymarket.com

> Another thing you could do is dump your database into a _data file and use Jekyll to serve static content as a JSON api. That would be absurdly fast and would potentially be a much better solution for serving a read-only web API than building a full on rails app for exposing a dataset.

Couldn't you, with much the same effort, just convert your database to a static set of JSON files? What, exactly, does Jekyll bring to the table here? (Also, is it really an API if it's static?)

Probably. One thing that would be interesting would be to use some of the categories, filtering, and other things Jekyll gives you. However, you're right, you could just as easily do it without Jekyll.

I used Jekyll for years.

My favorite Jekyll trick was ditching it for middleman.

I eventually went with Middleman for my actual website (back when I tried to make money selling OS X apps on the side) mostly because it allowed a 1:N mapping of templates:pages. But for simple blogs hosted on github-pages, Jekyll is still fine.

Funny.. My favorite trick was ditching Jekyll for Hugo. Easiest install. Fastest rendering. Truly live reloading.

Thanks for this. First I've heard of Hugo. I've been minded to kick the tyres of a static site generator again for a while now, after an unsuccessful tinker with Octopress a year or so ago. Given I'm also looking for an excuse to hack around with learning a bit of Golang, Hugo looks like it might be ideal.

I have been working on building better deployment systems for my Jekyll sites. I opted for using a Bash script for deployment and ended up integrating with CircleCI:

https://github.com/philipithomas/www.philipithomas.com/blob/...

The nesting _posts in subfolders trick is awesome, I wish I had known about that before I wasted countless hours learning how to customize Jekyll and eventually giving up:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9829302/return-list-of-fi...

Nice tricks! The most relevant for me however would be the idea of categorizing _posts and _data folder, never knew about that! Neat. Thanks!

Stopped reading at "awesome"

Check out BitBalloon [disclaimer, my startup] for an alternative to S3 + Cloudfront.

S3 on it's own actually have very bad latency, and it doesn't give you any good way to do atomic deploys (you just upload one file after the other, so if you deploy fairly often visitors might visit your site in an inconsistent state).

Cloudfront helps on the latency, but invalidating cached assets can take some time.

BitBalloon does atomic deploys, perfect caching headers, HTTPS for custom domains, and more.

Here's our guide on setting up continous deployments for Jekyll sites with BitBalloon:

https://www.bitballoon.com/blog/2013/12/13/continous-deploym...

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