Hello World

Well it’s January 2015 and the snow falling outside has given me a good excuse to avoid my primary New Year’s resolution of a bi-weekly run! So I’ve decided to start working on my fallback resolution and setup a blog. Self-confessed geek that I am, I quite enjoyed evaluating the different blogging platforms out there. I looked at WordPress, Ghost and Jekyll.

I discounted WordPress fairly quickly. It’s a comprehensive one-stop-shop for blogging and content management; but it was too heavy weight for my simple blog and the user interface felt a bit bloated and clunky.

Ghost was a real contender. It was easy to setup by simply downloading the code and running npm install. The user interface is super slick with a simple split-screen Markdown editor that shows the Markdown on the left and a preview on the right. The way Ghost handles images is particularly clever, you add a placeholder for the image in your Markdown, and an upload panel appears in situ on the preview pane where you can drag-and-drop your image.

I had a couple of niggles with Ghost. I couldn’t get spell check to work, even though my browser has a built in spell checker. Although the preview is excellent, it doesn’t show your post styled in your chosen theme… in order to see the finished article you have to publish it, which seemed a little odd.

Jekyll also uses Markdown syntax, but unlike Ghost it generates static HTML for your site upfront so you can host it pretty much anywhere. Jekyll is a Ruby Gem, you install it and scaffold a template site from the command line:

gem install jekyll
jekyll new colinthegeek
cd colinthegeek
jekyll serve

This will start your new site on port 4000. As you edit your blog article or theme, Jekyll will monitor your files and regenerate the site each time you save. If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer Jekyll will feel very familiar.

Jekyll requires that you to add metadata to your Markdown to help the theme generate your site. They call this Front Matter and takes the format of YAML at the top of you Markdown file:

---
layout: post
title: Hello World
---
Well it's January 2015...

This turns out to be a really flexible approach. I added a new summary property to my posts then edited the home page template to use the summary rather than display the entire post. I did this without needing to extend the framework or register the new attribute, it just worked!

When it comes time to publish your blog, you run a jekyll build command to compile your Markdown posts into a static HTML site that can be hosted on a basic HTTP server.

But here’s where it gets really cool, GitHub Pages will host your Jekyll site, for free! You simply push your Jekyll site to a GitHub repository called <your_username>.github.io, and GitHub will compile the site and make it available on http://<your_username>.github.io. They even allow you to point a custom domain name to your site. Thanks GitHub!

If you’re interested, you can view the source code of this blog on GitHub:

https://github.com/ColinOrr/colinorr.github.io.

Jekyll won’t be for everyone, it’s very much a developer platform for writing a blog and the blogger must be familiar with Markdown, GitHub and Ruby to get started. Ghost is also a great choice with a lower barrier to entry, however, you’d need to find somewhere to host it and think about your backup strategy which isn’t an issue when using GitHub Pages.