As you might have guessed from the URL, this very website runs on Jekyll, Github’s static site generator. The main reason why I have opted for this was the amazing uptime and virtually unlimited storage and bandwidth that Github Pages provide.
However, there’s a catch - you cannot [yet] use a CMS to add and change content. This may be a deal-breaker when developing a site for an organisation with fairly tech-challenged marketing and PR personnel. On the other hand, it could be a breeze for users with knowledge of the supported MarkDown format. In addition, a comment section and sharing buttons may be implemented by merely copying the HTML provided by respective service providers.
Extensibility is where however Jekyll is severely lacking compared to well-established CMSes like WordPress. Fortunately, coding for Jekyll might be less demanding than writing WordPress plugins due to WordPress’s hook system that resembles an event-driven framework based on the process of outputing HTML to be served to a client.
Your best bet would be to determine who will be posting from your blog and whether the learning curve to use Jekyll is worthwhile. For those willing to give it a shot, you can head to their straight-forward documentation.
Filed under technology
Tags technology blogging ruby jekyll web github githubpages code