Did you try turning it off and on again?

I’m feeling that “good intentions”, “new year” feeling! You know, eat well, exercise more, start a blog. That kind of thing. I’ve started a blog in the past. And stopped. So here’s a reboot.

The site is built using Jekyll. It’s a “static site generator”, built in Ruby. It creates HTML and static assets like JavaScript and CSS for you. As a blogger, you would need to write templates (in one of a couple of templating languages), and content (in any of a short collection of possiblities). You access it from the command line and will need to find your own way to start hosting (although it has hooks into Github if you host your content there).

For the most part, I work as a front-end developer; JavaScript pays my bills. In the past I’ve used the Assemble static site generator on both personal and commercial projects. It’s built in JavaScript, on node.js so you’d think I’d want to use that for this blog.

So why did I chose Jekyll?

The main reason is simplicity. Jekyll assumes you’re creating a blog and has built-in or near-as-damn-it support for SASS and CoffeeSCript. You can do all that and more with Assemble, but it would take configuration. I like the configuartion part, but that’s the day-job: creating sites, creating tools to create sites. I’d be too-easily side-tracked in grunt (which powers Assemble), and npm or bower rather than improving my written communication.