The Immediate Future of Jekyll

While Jekyll is cool to run a blog, it could be a PITA if you want to run a marketing site or something less blog-like with it. This made me to create Punch (<a href="http://laktek.github.com/punch" rel="nofollow">http://laktek.github.com/punch</a>), which can be easily customized to run many different kinds of sites.<p>If you already have a blog based on Jekyll, but feels it takes forever to build. Consider switching it to Punch with this boilerplate (<a href="https://github.com/laktek/punch-blog" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/laktek/punch-blog</a>). Basically, you only need to move the files from Jekyll's `_posts` directory to Punch's `posts` directory. Also, you would love the ease in template customizations (and ability to use partial layouts).

My annoyances with Jekyll from (<a href="http://substancehq.com/why-substance" rel="nofollow">http://substancehq.com/why-substance</a>)<p><pre><code> I used to be a happy jekyll user for a long time. But, bloggin using jekyll is frustrating when you have to make a lot of minor edits. The commit → push dance is too much while making small edits. Also, I don't know a straight way of doing jekyll redirects and allowing the use of tags/categories. Substance fixes those issues because it is dynamic I sometimes wonder what age we are living in, when we (the tech bloggers) use a static site generator for our blogs. Jekyll's main strength has been that it's very very flexible, I've tried to build Substance to give the most flexibility to the users without complicating things. </code></pre> Substance (<a href="http://substancehq.com/" rel="nofollow">http://substancehq.com/</a>) is a simple blogging engine / site builder without any fluff. I created it to replace Jekyll for myself. Hope others find it useful.<p>Also, it has ability to add custom data collections easily. If you want to build a simple site, this comes in very handy.

It's refreshing to see that the CEO of a $100 million company can still be excited about something as trivial as a static blog generator.

I don't understand why "decrease build time" receives such emphasis; isn't build time largely irrelevant to the type of sites that are appropriate for a static site generator?

I am a Python programmer yet Jekyll is still my preferred static blog generator. I strongly considered Pelican but did not like all the magic it came with. Pelican would consolidate all my blog posts to the same location and had various (configurable) directory conventions that I would've to follow.<p>I needed just a simple compiler which converts markdown to html while retaining the structure of the site. Ideally, what need not be processed should be left as is. This gives developers like me a lot of flexibility to design a site.<p>Jekyll has not been updated for a long time but it still serves my needs quite well. I hope future releases would support minification and preprocessors like Coffeescript.

I've only recently heard of jekyll but have been searching or thinking about creating a markdown based blog for a while. I first discovered it through an article on the obama campaign, and how they used it in combination with AWS:S3 <a href="http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/" rel="nofollow">http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...</a>. Jekyll is here to stay.

Anyone who doesn't know Ruby (like, at all) tried using Jekyll? How was your experience?<p>I've wanted to for a while but I feel somewhat handicapped not knowing Ruby so I've been putzing around Python-based alternatives like Pelican.