Reasons for using Jekyll

My previous incarnation of my site was based upon WordPress which is a great blogging platform. The CMS is dynamic enough that you could do anything with it. I however found it to be a bit too much for my use. I felt that I only used a minority of it’s features and desperately wanted to find a better solution, something more lightweight, powerful and fast. This is the point where I came across Jekyll.

Jekyll is awesome. To quote the author of Jekyll:

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through Textile or Markdown and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favourite web server.

Because the final generated site is in .html it will be super-fast because you’re not relying on any database calls being made to the server. Everything is static and it just loads. This is a big win for performance!

Another benefit is that if I know that Jekyll can do something for me instead of using JavaScript then i’ll let it. For example syntax highlighting which is done using Pygments. Another win for performance.

So that’s some or partial reasons but I’m more than happy with it. I’ve also moved my site to Github so you can view the entire code if you want to see how it all works.