Jekyll
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Jekyll is Ruby software that helps you create "Simple, blog-aware, static sites" suitable for static domain hosting. It is simple in sense that it does one thing well. It compiles HTML and markdown files into a static website.
The learning curve is steep for those not used to HTML. However, there is a pattern of people migrating from WordPress to Jekyll, and many people in IRC have experience with setting up Jekyll.
It was made popular by GitHub's offer to build and host your jekyll powered website for free. While GitHub may be a form of a silo that can easily host a Jekyll website, Jekyll has no dependence upon GitHub. Projects like jekyll-hook can help replicate the publishing workflow that GitHub offers on your own server.
See also: projects#Jekyll
Contents |
Pros
- It's git friendly!
- It's a great way to learn more about websites HTML, CSS and other web technologies and standards.
- Open source and free!
- Large community and active development team
- Lets you create pretty much any kind of static website you want.
- Has a powerful plugin system
- Easily self hosted
- Simple static pages are the result of your hard work.
- Free hosting on gh-pages or amazon s3
Cons
- The liquid templating engine has no love for pretty HTML
- It takes a while to learn the ins and outs of what can be created.
- Static pages restricts your options when participating in the real-time web
- POSSE is tricky with jekyll.
- Learning to use the ruby toolchain is really difficult for beginners and non-technical people
Related Tools
- Pagoda - a self hosted, mobile friendly editor for jekyll pages.
- jekyll hook - A self hosted gh-pages like server.
- Prose.io - An editor for github repositories. Itself is hosted on GH-pages and runs almost entirely client side in the browser. read more
- gitpub an experimental git based micropub client that works with jekyll.
- jekmentions - a webmention endpoint specifically designed for Jekyll sites on GitHub pages that commits the received webmentions to a Jekyll collection.
- A quick, but wrong, fix for blank lines in Jekyll - A hacky script (see bottom of blog post) that strips out extraneous blank lines (unless they are in pre or code blocks) from a built site.
- Jekyll-IndieWeb A Jekyll starter install with microformat markup, including support for h-card and receiving webmentions. Work in progress…
- ... Please add more as you find them
IndieWeb Examples
IndieWeb community members using Jekyll on their own primary sites:
-
Calum Ryan (2015) on [1]
- Ben Ward (2011) on benward.me
-
Bret Comnes (2013) on bret.io
-
Pelle Wessman (2014) on voxpelli.com using GitHub Pages. Supports eg. Webmention and Micropub.
-
Will Norris (2011, 2014) on willnorris.com (switched away from WordPress).
- Rudy Jahchan: on rudyjahchan.com (moved from WordPress)
- Leonardo Zangrando (2013): on lionzan.me
- Alan Leal (2014): on Leal.IO using GitHub Pages
-
atomicules on atomicules.co.uk
-
Giovanni T. Parra on fiatjaf.alhur.es
- Tristan Thomas on tristanthomas.me (using Sandstorm.io)
- River MacLeod on mm0hai.net
- ...Lots of others. Add yourself!
Other Notable Examples
- Github uses jekyll for their own blog and more recently their support documents.
- TravisCI uses it for their documentation website (source).
- ...
Troubleshooting
Something is not working on my local box
Something is not working on my local box.
Be sure to:
- Update rvm (ruby)
- install the liquid gem
- gem install jekyll
gem install jekyll hangs indefinitely
"gem install jekyll" hangs indefinitely
Note:
- gem install jekyll takes a very long time. It may appear to be hanging but just let it go. Go for a walk or something.
Asks
- It would be nice to document step by step on example solutions and problems with POSSE-ing a typical Jekyll install.
