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Comment by nkantar | Hacker News Reader

> The overwhelming majority of users have javascript enabled.

I find that it's often developers who don't, making it a questionable tradeoff (in my mind) for a blog written by one. For this very reason I choose to use absolutely no JavaScript on mine. (Correction: Oops, Gists are included via JavaScript — I'll be replacing them with code blocks ASAP.)

I had some of the same annoyances as the OP, and chose Jekyll + GitHub Pages instead (http://nkantar.com/choosing-jekyll/). I found that optimizing for my workflow (write Markdown, commit, push) was more worthwhile than having absolutely zero generation tools (which I don't even need if I simply create a new file on GitHub, as a neat bonus I've used at least once so far).

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I wrote my own blogging engine [1] back when there weren't many (any?) to choose from (started it in 1999), and geared the workflow of posting to my preferred method: email (although it helps that I run my own server) and I'm surprised that method isn't used more often.

I can also use a web interface if I am desperate, as well as adding an entry as a file (the email interface is similar to the file mechanism---it just pulls the entry out of the body of the email).

Granted, the language I used is rather unorthodox, but it works.

[1] https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog

A C-based Apache httpd blogging engine using email to create the blog entries... Sweet.

Reading the source and discovering:

  WTF?  This isn't a WTF.  This is a debugging technique.

Hard core! :-)

I found Jekyll really really hard to get up and running despite the documentation promising it would be easy. (This is a running theme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9920740) So I wrote this blog post to explain lots of the aspects that confused me and some others besides targeted towards somebody who is not intimately familiar with all the things involved: http://softholmsyndrome.com/2015/04/16/using-jekyll-taming-h...

EDIT (Thu Jul 23 21:33:12 PDT 2015): The formatting on that post seems to be borked a bit, I'm working on it.

I've been asked by some very mildly technical designers to write up how to use Jekyll (especially with GitHub Pages), so until I get around to doing that, I'm gonna' send them to your post as a "here's basically what you might have to look forward to".

That said, I had no real issues setting it up on OS X and Debian/Ubuntu, but then I was at least somewhat familiar with how all the parts are supposed to work.

Thanks, I'm not entirely satisfied with the quality of that post so knowing people will actually read it is a serious motivator to make it better, which I'm doing right now.

i used jekyll as well, and it's alright. this thing gives you the same workflow minus dependency on ruby runtime or a specific hosting platform that supports jekyll (like github for example).

i just write stuff and git push it to heroku

I suppose I chose dependency on Ruby over dependency on client-side JS, though they're not mutually exclusive anyway.

It's a neat concept, for sure, and incredibly similar to something I once wanted to implement for photo galleries (and might still, since this actually seems to work quite well).

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