Finishing Up the Jekyll Installation

At this point I’ve almost completely migrated the site to Jekyll, and although the styles still need improvement, my opinion of the platform has, at the very least, brightened. The remaining tasks are mostly to also move projects over so people can check them out.

To provide some context, I recently clean installed Ubuntu 16.04 on my server because I was skeptical about how well I had set up the previous instance. I also wanted to get away from PHP since the majority of the main site was static. I had heard about Jekyll previously, so I decided to try it out.

At first, Jekyll seemed alright, but after setting up git hooks on my server to make deployment more convenient, I started having issues with dependency installation with Ruby and Bundler. What’s worse, after finall sorting that out, I discovered, to my disappointment, that the free Jekyll themes already out there (which I had imagined to be beautifully minimalistic) were mostly (in my opinion) garbage.

So, I gave up for a few days. But after taking another look at the template and blog code, I figured I might as well just use Jekyll with my old style sheets and update the looks later.

On this journey, however, I did learn a couple of things I like about Jekyll. For example:

• Data files can help avoid using databases for everything
• Sass compilation is bundled into the development server
• Templating and in-page logic are good for abstraction and convenience
• Blogging directly in markdown is super convenient and git compatible
• Jekyll is pretty cool

So, if you’re interested in setting up a Jekyll blog and are curious about how I built this one, here are a couple of resources I was able to use, check out my highspeed tutorial.

Good luck!