Loaded Thoughts

Blogging with Jekyll

Having tried to pick up blogging many times, I think I've found an engine, Jekyll, that will let me write how I want to write.

This site is not pretty, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s clear of clutter, confusion, and constraints. Normally, this blank canvas, both in preparation and presentation, would actually be intimidating to me, as I’m sure it is to most people. However, this time it’s different because I don’t need anything else to write; I just need something to write about.

Current blog systems are chock-full of feature options, site configurations, personalization tools, metadata tags, categories, extra fields, upload tools, etc. While you could start writing right away, why not explore the features and setup the blog to be more personalized, optimized and get things better categorized?

With Wordpress, Movable Type, and Textpattern, I found myself tinkering with features and templates more than actually getting down and dirty with text. The littles things that are meant to be helpful and aid in writing and publishing, became the very things that I allowed to serve as a distractions to avoid writing and publishing.

This is where I feel Jekyll excels. My config file is just two lines, my layout is just two pages of html, and the rest of my site is one other html page and two xml files. All of which can be found at my github project for this site.

My freedom is further enabled by being able to use tools already in my workflow. Writing is as simple as a blank TextMate document in Textile or HTML, revisions with git, and file management with the Finder. Also, publishing is a “rake deploy” away.

Things can become more complex with CSS, more layouts and pages, etc., but for now a simple HTML layout with a blogging engine that “just works” and stays out of the way is what I’ve been wanting. I think I’ve found that in Jekyll.