After letting the dust settle on Jekyll (and just a lack of time to develop) I am learning Jekyll ?.

What is Jekyll?

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First of all, a small quote from the documentation site.

“Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through a converter (like Markdown) and our Liquid renderer, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server.”

It does what you tell it to do, no more, no less. It doesn’t try to outsmart users by making bold assumptions, nor does it burden them with needless complexity and configuration. Put simply, Jekyll gets out of your way and allows you to concentrate on what truly matters: your content.

In easy to understand words; it’s a framework to change Markdown files to HTML files and use them to power a website. Content updating can’t be made easier with a static website.

 

Why use it?

Jekyll is efficient and eliminates copying & pasting websites. It uses Markdown (so writing content for a website is easy). Furthermore, it can be hosted on GitHub using GitHub Pages. Managing a web server is no longer needed. GitHub automatically runs the proper commands to render the Markdown file to a HTML file. GitHub ❤️.

 

How to learn it?

I’ve watched a few Youtube videos, consulted with an expert and read a lot about Jekyll. YouTube is filled with videos with setting up guides, use cases and tutorials.

The sources I found especially relevant

 

Results

I’ve built one website with it. The site is called NerdNight. An evening at school for students to work on their projects and some interesting breakout sessions. It’s hosted on GitHub. The result can be viewed here. NerdNight.rocks

I learned how to use Jekyll and GitHub for deployment and I had a very good time doing it :-)

Sewing machine?

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Sewing machine Image credit Unsplash by Annie Spratt.

Why the Sewing machine? Because the first version of mechanization provided users with a means to sew a lot faster, without knowing the exact process inside the machine.