When I decided to publish my website about software development, I started thinking which technology I should use to run it. I didn’t want to use anything that is heavy weight as I only plan to publish text and other static content at the moment.

I didn’t want to use anything like Wixx or similar sites as I like working on the source code of the site directly and without need to login to the server. I also like to have the source code under my own control. For another project of mine, I had used an HTML template and build a simple program that transformed my JSON articles into HTML using Clojure and Luminus. I didn’t want to reuse it here, as I didn’t want to reuse the same html template and would have needed to adapt lot of the code for another template. As I wanted to start my site without distracting myself with coding the site itself, I decided to look for a solution where I wouldn’t have to bother about programming the template or manipulating html myself.

That’s when I found Jekyll. The project describes itself as “simple, blog-aware, static sites“. So it sounded exactly like what I was searching. So I tried it, played around with it, was satisfied with its simplicity and was able to start blogging immediatly. The toughest part is probably installing Ruby which I luckily had done already.

So here I am, up and running with my homepage in less than 30 minutes. I am aware that I will need to invest some time as soon as I want some dynamic content like comments and similar, but I’ll handle it when I need it, probably by just extending the template a bit. But for now I’m happy to be up and running without the need to program something myself and distracting myself for what I really wanted to do.