Monkey and Machine

In my never ending quest for a suitable blog engine I may very well have found my perfect gem. As a matter of fact, it came in a gem.

I got a bit tired of all the full and mostly over featured (at least for my needs) weblog software that is available. Most of the software was heavy on my hosting service due to dependencies on a database. This anoyed the hack out of me because in most cases I could not do anything about it as most software does not support alternative data storage or is modulair enough to build it myself (which I’m perfectly confortable with). Then my pall Jeroen came to my rescue. He had been struggeling with the same problems but he ran into something very cool.

Jeroen came across Jekyll, a small Ruby program that is capable of generating a static site from a buch of files containing dynamic data. Basically it’s a caching mechanism. It lets you use different templating engines to generate a site quickly and with a little Ruby scripting it will generate a weblog for you. I got excited while testing it’s capabilyties that I decided to port my weblog to it. And here we are.

The nice thing about Jekyll is that it fits in my workflow as a programmer. It lets me keep my files in a Git repository (not on GitHub though) and edit my files in a normal text editor. I can use HTML whenever I want to and do not have to edit in a WYSIWYG editor. Each of my posts is contained in it’s own text file and if I want to I can use a markup language like Markdown to ease the writing. Once I’m done writing I check in my new post, generate it with Jekyll and simply RSync it to my (Jeroen’s) server. No Wordpress like systems are needed and were only interupting my workflow. I was just craving for something more close to my programming nature, a little more hackish.

Jekyll is written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner, the guy behind GitHub, with this purpose. It’s Open Source (MIT licensed) and also extendible if you know Ruby. So, guess I’ll be learning Ruby as my new language for next year!

PS: sorry if I messed up the feed.