FYI: You can find more than 200+ (free, open source) ready-to-fork (use) Jekyll themes on Dr Jekyll's [1]. PS: Dr Jekyll's itself is an (open source) Jekyll site on GitHub Pages. Happy Jekylling.
[1] <a href="https://drjekyllthemes.github.io" rel="nofollow">https://drjekyllthemes.github.io</a>
Last time I tried GitHub Pages it got stuck in cache for several hours, could not get the article to update.<p>So switched to Netlify (<a href="https://www.netlify.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.netlify.com</a>) which took about 15 minutes to setup for Jekylll, custom domain and SSL. Was a relief to be in control again.
For anyone looking to learn how to use Jekyll Cloud Cannon[1] has a really well made set of tutorials and some nice looking free themes.<p>Personally I would skip GitHub and just put it up on a cheap vps, you can set it up to auto compile on a git push like GitHub as well. [2]<p>[1]<a href="https://learn.cloudcannon.com" rel="nofollow">https://learn.cloudcannon.com</a>
[2]<a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-jekyll-development-site-on-ubuntu-16-04" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...</a>
Instead of committing generated HTML to a git repo, you could use GitLab Pages and use any static site generator and run any custom scripts you like.
They run commands on a container, you are not restricted to the blessed GitHub choices.
I've started playing around with using Firebase to host static sites. The free tier is pretty generous, and I won't exceed any of those restrictions anytime soon. SSL by default, custom domains, etc. are pretty nice. It's a Google product now, so do with that what you will, but setup was really straightforward.
Unless Jekyll has changed a lot, using themes is a major pain. Since Jekyll doesn't enforce any particular structure, there's no way to have drop-in themes. Using a new theme is really about cloning a theme and then re-writing your site to hopefully make use of it. Or pick at bits and pieces you like and make your own custom theme.
I'm amazed there's no mention of GitLab's Pages. They seem to be quite superior in this aspect.<p>You can just configure CI to run any arbitrary script(s), and publish the resulting files. This also includes Jekyll (which is trivial to set up), but also other much complex scenarios.
Another Jekyll advantage: Jekyll it makes it easy to host a blog under your main domain.com/blog, without the need to use a subdomain, without the need to fiddle with Wordpress and without the need to switch your whole website to a (new) CMS. This is a huge timesaver (We use it at <a href="https://a9t9.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://a9t9.com/blog</a> and a very happy with it.)<p>According to the SEO Guru(s), this brings a SEO advantage <a href="https://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating" rel="nofollow">https://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdoma...</a>
I don't see why this is a problem. I don't use themes at all and I have my own look and feel. If you check the docs you will see that overriding the default theme is oretty straightforward.
Unless I'm mistaken, it seems the author missed this short paragraph in the docs:<p><i>With a clear understanding of the theme’s files, you can now override any theme file by creating a similarly named file in your Jekyll site directory.</i><p>So the gem is the base theme and you overwrite any of those theme files by inserting a same-named file in the same dir structure in your project root. I've haven't jumped to Jekyll 3 yet but if I'm reading this correctly, this doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
> I have seen some repositories where people have written Travis jobs to do this exact thing. I feel that is an overkill, a slow process and downright exploitation of a free service<p>Is the “exploitation of a free service” part valid?
part of the point of jekyll to me is being in control of all the markup on the page, which is why the idea of using a theme goes against how I would use it.
I never understood the purpose of those "static page generators". The only thing they really do is add a html header to your text? Honestly, for all that hassle I prefer to copy-paste manually a few lines of html every time that I write a new file, and that's it.