Well it will probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me. I like nerdy things, but I also like minimalistic things. A few months ago I tried to create a personal website for myself that emulated the nostalgic terminals of old computers. I approached this by writing a custom parser of markdown files; it ended up being wildly complex and I shelved it for a future date. Since then I wrote two more personal websites in both Wordpress and Laravel. While I had fun with both projects, the maintenance of Wordpress and the amount of overhead required for Laravel turned me off both frameworks. Both Wordpress and Laravel have their place, but neither ticked all of the boxes that I needed.

I was after something that would let me quickly jump into and out of a task, something that would let me add content when I had the time, something that had fewer squirrels to chase up trees. After some thought, I’ve realized that my number one distraction is html, formatting, tags. Every system I’ve used has some kind of feature that I end up frustrated with; I don’t think Jekyll will be an exception to the rule either. I however believe that Jekyll will keep me away from html until the creative portion of the task is over.

With Jekyll forcing me to use markdown I’m able to add content more or less free of some WYSIWYG nesting spans everywhere and generally making the task less bearable. That’s one giant checkbox in favour of Jekyll.

I’m also just one person, I don’t think I will be creating content fast enough to require a whole database to myself. If I had dynamic content or some reason to include an authentication system then maybe this post would be written about the merits of Wordpress or Laravel. But I’m just one person and I don’t have those needs.

Overall Jekyll offers a nearly maintenance free experience; updating is simple and straightforward. Hacking Jekyll is made very difficult with no databases or login pages to be compromised. Themes also appear to use a simple template engine including painless sass support. Revisions are easy to handle too, any version control system will integrate well with Jekyll.

While this is just my first glance at Jekyll, it appears to fit my current needs well. I’m curious how well it will hold up to my expectations over the next few months.