Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages for Our Site

I have never used Jekyll. I do, however, frequently use nanoc[1] - it takes a bit more effort to set up, but it is <i>far</i> more flexible, because instead of ridiculous configuration files, you are actually writing Ruby code (in a very nice DSL, might I add) that controls how each set of files is compiled.<p>One thing I did with it was create a Web site with recipes on it. The recipe files didn't have any actual content, everything was stored in the metadata. I had the Rules file set up so that they would run the Recipes through a layout that would expand them to HTML (<i>consistently</i>), then <i>that</i> was run through the normal page template.<p>It also used a preprocess rule to generate fresh items "on the fly" that serve as indices for each recipe type. Again, no content - the Rules file is set up so that the artificial items get all their content from a layout before being <i>actually</i> layouted with the site template.<p>[1]: <a href="http://nanoc.stoneship.org/" rel="nofollow">http://nanoc.stoneship.org/</a>

Ever since I installed Wappalyzer in my browser (detects what frameworks and technologies a website uses) more and more often I come across websites that I am shocked use so many backend and frontend frameworks. I'm shocked because that means they are spending unnecessary amounts of money, time and effort on hosting (e.g. Wordpress hosting), development and maintenance when the entire site would be perfectly well-served (and faster!) with static pages.<p>The problem until recently was that there weren't appropriate tools for the job, but this article should prove that's now changing.

Powers the Shopify website as well by the way. Jekyll was a good fit since we made Liquid and are therefore really familiar with it.

What I always found a bit annoying about jekyll (at least without plugin or forks) is that something like <a href="http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/" rel="nofollow">http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/</a> or <a href="http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/" rel="nofollow">http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/09/</a> doesn't work, i.e. the set of archive pages is pretty limited. You get one big one, and then a simple numeric pagination. I used some perl script ages ago (blosxom?), and it did just that.<p>Still, I guess I can hack that into the code somehow…<p>One "prepackaged" jekyll configuration that looks quite interesting is Octopress: <a href="http://octopress.org/" rel="nofollow">http://octopress.org/</a>

If you're interesting in this, you should also check out Octopress, which sits on top of Jekyll and provides a nice default theme, handy addons (for google site search, disqus comments, twitter/facebook sharing, etc.), and deployment scripts.<p><a href="http://octopress.org/" rel="nofollow">http://octopress.org/</a>

the maps on the site are designed in [tilemill](<a href="http://tilemill.com/pages/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://tilemill.com/pages/index.html</a>), and served by [tilestream](<a href="http://mapbox.com/#/tilestream" rel="nofollow">http://mapbox.com/#/tilestream</a>), btw.

Excellent execution, custom YAML fields allow for a lot of options.<p>I do the same, except I host at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which just feels right.