I'm the author of Jekyll and cofounder of GitHub. This is a great review of Jekyll in its infancy. We're using Jekyll as part of the GitHub Pages stack, and because Jekyll is a very young project, we're giving our customers a chance to shape the future of this feature. If, after you read this article, you find yourself trying out Jekyll and/or GitHub Pages, think about what else you'd like to see included, and if your ideas (or code!) align with our goals, I'll be happy to implement (or merge!) them in the project. I wrote Jekyll to scratch my own itch, but now that it's in use by a broader audience, I'd like to help you scratch yours as well.
I switched my blog over to Jekyll last week. It feels much better to be using Git and Emacs to manage the blog instead of random Web apps and crappy text editors.<p>Since then the number of jekyll forks on GitHub has exploded. I've added tagging, fixed numerous bugs, made the templating work a little better, and added the ability to insert arbitrary script execution results (I use this to generate the tag cloud on my site).<p>You can find my fork at http;//github.com/metajack/jekyll/tree/master<p>I've also written an MT -> Jekyll convertor and an MT -> Disqus convertor which are at<p><a href="http://github.com/metajack/mt2jekyll/tree/master" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/metajack/mt2jekyll/tree/master</a><p>I imagine it will be a little while before the development free for all settles down, but until then, it is easy to hack on and easy to grok.
>The worst aspect in setting up this site was dealing with the templating engine Liquid.<p>The article author should look at existing ruby/rake based static website generator <a href="http://webby.rubyforge.org" rel="nofollow">http://webby.rubyforge.org</a>. It offers a choice of templating languages (ERB, Textile, Markdown, HAML, SASS).<p>Another killer feature is webby's ability to process LaTeX snippets and generate formula images for the web page.<p>So more templating choices and webby-like custom text processing filters (LaTeX, graphviz, tidy, coderay etc) are my feature requests for Jekyll.