Glad to see Jekyll development resume -- bravo! For those who prefer Python over Ruby, be sure to check out Pelican, version 3.2 of which was recently released. Bountiful themes, plugins, and a very active community: http://getpelican.com/
I recently moved my blog from Jekyll to Pelican and wrote about it [1].
Functionally some of the differences I found are:
* Jekyll output directory structure has a one-to-one correspondence with its input. While Pelican tries to standardize it for you e.g. static files go to one folder.
* Pelican has built in support for theming. Jekyll makes no such distinction between your theme and content.
* Pelican has a much more modular architecture since it can supports multiple inputs like reStructuredText/Markdown and multiple outputs like PDF
Anecdotally, I found Jekyll to be a bit slower than Python for building my blog.
I imagine most HN people do know that Jekyll is a static blog generator written in Ruby, which is used by Github pages. However, he has a point that I often up on open source release announcements, and I don't know what the project is about, and there isn't an obvious link to the that information.
It's really advice to the coder on spreading word about your project. If you want people to dig into it, help them. Don't make them go on a wild goose chase figuring out what the thing is in the first place. If you don't have a reason to care about something in the first few seconds, you'll move along and look at something else that is shiny.
It hasn't really. Google doesn't read code and summarize purpose yet...that still requires people who understand to convey they message to those that don't.
I do know what it is; I also know what Jenkins, Jakarta, Jellyfish and Jasper are.
There is literally nothing in the text of the linked page to provide enough context for those of us who are familiar with projects but bad with names to decipher which one of the thousands of projects we've seen announced or discussed it is about.
Jekyll is one of hundreds of projects that popped up in the Great Static Site Generator Rush of 2012, so I think asking for a blurb is reasonable.
I love using Jekyll to generate my blog, and I host it in an S3 bucket making it extremely cheap and easy to serve.
Lately I've been wanting to revive all of my old digital photos and put them online. I'm considering using Jekyll to make an online gallery of photo albums hosted on S3 as well. This might turn into my next side-project. Has someone done something like this before?
I've been using it for my own purposes for a while but it needs some polishing. It's a static gallery generator that supports images and videos. It has themes and S3 uploads, with a plugin framework for anything else you might want to add on.
Another static gallery generator (which I am the author): https://github.com/saimn/sigal/
It shares some spirit with pelican. Python, jinja2, themes (currently galleria and colorbox). The goal is to make it easy to use javascript libs like galleria.
started one this weekend, it lets you put image directories in _galleries/ and provides you with resized images. needs work yet before it's generally useful but might be a helpful start:
Jekyll's all well and good but after a lot of deliberation I settled on Nanoc[1]. Most of the static generators seem much of a muchness, at one point I was almost ready to roll my own in python with Jinja2.
I also found that these generators are heavier than what my small blog needed.
A few months back I tried migrating from WordPress to Jekyll. A week or two after that I tried moving from Jekyll to OctoPress. I wasn't happy with either solution, so I wound up rolling my own in Python.
In three hours of work on a spare weekend, I had everything converted to my own static generator. It compiles and deploys new posts in under two seconds. It does takes longer if you make style changes, because it will then recompile Bootstrap.
If you are interested in writing your own, then check out the markdown module for Python (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Markdown). Everything else was standard Python to generate the blog, and Bash scripts to deploy it.
Any idea when GitHub Pages will start using 1.0 (or are they using it already?). Really want to start using that gist tag ASAP (copy-pasting the <script> embeds is a bit of a pain).
This is great news :) I generate my own personal site with Jekyll, but I'll also have to update my tutorial (http://learn.andrewmunsell.com/learn/jekyll-by-example) with some of the new stuff... The scaffolding command will definitely be great to get new users started.
The new site looks much better, too! There's definitely a lot more, useful documentation.
I'm a huge fan of Jekyll. Two things I'd love to see pop out from the community:
1) Online Editor. I know there is Prose.io, but it requires me to host on GH pages. I like hosting on S3. parkr, I'm guessing Cornell is using some sort of backend to edit posts/pages?
2) An iPhone app that allows me to upload photos or write posts.
Prose.io does not require GH pages. You can use post-commit hooks to clone, build, and deploy your site to S3 (or anything else). I've got a quick example of it here: https://github.com/adelevie/iron-publish
I started out using Octopress but in the end chose to go just plain Jekyll and borrow from Octopress only the things I needed. I'm pretty happy with my decision.
Ultimately, you just need to look at the feature-set of Octopress and decide if you actually want those things (custom theme, Disqus and GA integration, etc). If you do, great, if not, it's probably going to get in the way more than help.
I ended up creating my own distribution of Jekyll which diverges significantly from Octopress. While it doesn't have anywhere near the following that Octopress does, it suits my uses more than fine.
As long as you spend a bunch of time customizing the theme, no.
Default-theme Octopress users all automatically get lumped under 'some dude using default Octopress' category in my brain - it's as close as you can get to publishing completely anonymously.
To be fair, the number of people who are over exposed to the point of a visceral feeling toward default Octopress has to be pretty small. But not putting you down or anything. Indeed, i can understand you feeling that way.
I don't dislike or otherwise feel viscerally towards the default Octopress theme - I can just remember the way a website looks far more easily than I can someone's name.
When I see a visually distinctive site for the second time, I think 'ah ha, I've been here before'. When I see someone's Octopress blog, I never know if it's the first or second or tenth time I've visited that particular blog.
I have the same trouble with Svbtle blogs, if they use a similar accent color - there's 'red Svbtle guy' and 'blue Svbtle guy' but with very few exceptions there aren't any discrete individuals.
I see. I jumped the gun and did not see your point was more nuanced than I thought. Yeah, o agree with what you say. I dont really come across default Octopress much anymore, but yeah I get the whole Svbtle look being around too much now and not showing individualism.
How do you guys generally setup commenting feature with Jekyll?
Do you use an external commenting service or is Jekyll able to handle it alone? (maybe through plugins?)
I know Jekyll is in the domine of static website generators, but it also says it's "blog aware" so...
I built a restful comment json service in rails as well as some light javascript in Jekyll that handles the display and jsonp requests. Whole thing took me a day and is far better than being dependent on disqus.
I didn't add any authentication or spam blocking, but that wasn't in scope for my needs.
I'm following the master branch and have been using some of the new features in some of my sites. There has been a lot of work to try and modularize Jekyll. Great job Parker, Tom, et al. Hopefully I will find some time to contribue.
That's a great point. For collaborative blogs, using Jekyll/GH spares you from having to sync permissions between your source control and your web host. That's big part of why we used Jekyll for SeattleHacks[1].
As a newbie just learning ruby/html, can someone explain to me how would Jekyll help me build a small static website for a small company? how does it differ from bootstrap?
A lot of blogs (most blogs?) are database-driven websites whose content is stored in a database. A server serving static webpages will enjoy better performance and static webpages are simpler to manage in many ways. However, some of the benefits a CMS gives you like auto-generating headers and navigational aids, etc, are missing if you just write some straight HTML yourself. So a static content generator can read your blueprint for the website layout and generate the webpages for you, and they don't have to be pieced together on every request they way they are with a CMS like Wordpress. Anytime you have new content to add, you can just add it to your files that you feed into the static content generator and it builds all the webpages of your entire website for you once again. I'll reiterate that the server doesn't have to waste any time processing the files to send them down to your browser--essentially, they're already complete and ready to serve down to you.
Bootstrap is basically a CSS framework. Your generated static files have normal HTML in them, and they could be using Bootstrap for the styles just like any other webpage.
I can only assume that Jekyll is only targeted at people who already know what it is/does, because I read everything visible on that page before the break, and have no idea what it is. Oh wait, there are hints about it being about "blogging" and "posts" and "tags" in the feature list.
