Why do I use jekyll for blogging

I have had blog already for 1.5 years by the october 2016. My first blog was created with https://www.blogger.com service which is provided by Google. This service is rather good for classical blogers, but not for developers. A developer wants own blog to be modern, maybe unique and have a lot of inserted formatted colored code. So, I decided to close my old blog and create a new one with Jekyll Some advantages of jekyll are described here, I’m sure it will attract you. Blog

Design templates

Almost every blog system has own design templates. Some of them could be downloaded from the internet and the best ones can be bought in different stores. Jekyll doesn’t have any templates. We are developers, we can do it ourselves! Somebody may consider it as disadvantage, but I think it is the absence of limits.

Simple dynamics part

As far as a blogger have to have own template, it must contain a little dynamic part, that is responsible for posts viewing, paging, tags and etc. Jekyll provides such functionality in a couple of code lines.

Although the jekyll code appearance can be minimal, the possibilities are rather rich. Anyway it is almost programming language. I don’t recommend do it, but it is possible to do more complicated things with it. Jekyll has a lot of plugins to extend base functionality.

Perfect code formatting

I always had problems with code highlighting in different services. Even in stackoverflow it is ugly. Jekyll has built-in plugin that highlights almost every programming language. The small example of java code is below.

    @ApiOperation(value = "authenticate")
    @POST
    public UserWrapperDto authenticate(@NotNull @Valid final Credentials credentials) {
        final UserTokenContainer userTokenContainer = userService.authenticate(credentials.getLogin(),
                credentials.getPassword());
        return userMapper.mapToDto(userTokenContainer);
    }

Of course, it is not so good, like in the Intellij Idea, but quite good for blog.

Work with blog like with code

Jekyll blog is a common project, that can be under the version control system. I use git, often I have a few branches with different unfinished articles. So merge to master means publishing. Also it is comfortable to write in favourite IDE, it is rather better than some notepad-like editors. A post can be written in html or markdown. I use markdown.

Static html & Github hosting

Although a jekyll project has a few dynamics, it can be compiled to static html. So you can choose any hosting you want - just upload _site folder to a server. Even github can host jekyll blog. Just create a repository with special name and push a jekyll project there. It will be build and served automatically.

Limits (disadvantages)

Anyway jekyll has obvious constraints due the fact it is static. It is impossible to add comments, likes or statistics without third-party services. Also almost all custom logic is unavailable. Before choosing jekyll you must find out what limits is appropriate for you.

You may visit my blog repository and look sources.

Jekyll Blog