Jekyll- Getting Started
About Jekyll
Jekyll is a web development framework created at GitHub, the most popular place in the world for hosting open-source code. Because Jekyll is easy to deploy and can be hosted for free on GitHub, many companies and developers conveniently use it to makes websites that introduce themselves and their work to their fellow developers and the world. Though Jekyll is user friendly, it provides powerful web development features. However, Jekyll is a static framework that does not offer all traditional web development functionality. Whether it is right for a specific project needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Jekyll Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Can be hosted for free at GitHub (can also be hosted elsewhere, but possibly not for free)
- Many Jekyll code-bases exist on GitHub to learn from
- Fairly easy to deploy
- Can use a custom domain
- Automated blog post creation out of the box
Cons:
- Static framework (as opposted to dynamic)
- Limited functionality
- Example websites tend to be simple, personal blogs, not complex, fully-featured websites
- Limited staged deployment
Cost Comparison
Squarespace website:
- $144/year basic, custom domain included
- Cost of labor, if any
Jekyll website:
- Can be hosted for free at GitHub
- Cost of domain (~$10)
- Cost of labor, if any
Tools Needed for This Project
- Git (GitHub provides a detailed installation tutorial)
- Ruby and Jekyll (GitHub provides a detailed installation tutorial)
- Start Bookstrap unstyled starter templates
- GitHub personal or organization account, in order to use GitHub gh-pages
- Optional: CNAME file (for custom domain)
- Optional: Disqus (for blog post comments)
- Optional: Jekyll plugins of interest