Switching to Jekyll
I have switched to Jekyll as my blogging platform. I’m a user with a lot of years of WordPress and Blogger on my back but I consider that Jekyll is a better solution for the kind of web site that I want to have.
Jekyll is a static site generator. You can use Jekyll to create lightweight sites that doesn’t rely on a database backend or on complex and sometimes bugged scripts, as usually happens with other CMS solutions. Jekyll can be used to create complete web sites or blogs.
In fact, Jekyll can be imagined (although it’s not exactly like that) as a web site compiler that receives plain text files with some kind of markup language such as Markdown or HTML and generates using a base template a set of HTML files that can be uploaded to any server in the world, even if they don’t support dynamic web site hosting.
I’m using GitHub Pages as my hosting provider. It’s free and it supports Jekyll. I only have to push my Jekyll source files (template and text files) to my GitHub repository and it gets automatically compiled and published to my home page. I’m using a custom domain, which is the only expense my webpage generates now, making this a cheaper solution than hosting a WordPress distribution in a server.
I’ve designed my own layout. I’ve been working on this design for about a week. It’s not even finished, because it can still be improved, but it works for now. My plan is to release the template as a separate project that can be later downloaded and used to create other web pages.