Disclaimer: Bias alert…

Reason

I had recently decided that I no longer needed a Wordpress site and began searching for an alternative. I don’t have high enough traffic or dynamic content to warrant the need to run and maintain a Wordpress site. So after some searching I looked into what ran GitHub Pages and learned that Jekyll was used. The cool part was that it was also a static generated site seemed to be the perfect fit for me.

Jekyll <= Wordpress Ruby/Liquid <= PHP

At first, I hesitated that there would be a long drawn out process to setup tooling, learning the liquid template language and the processes of building and deploying. It was however rather a gem install away and I was up and going in minutes.

After one full day I had finished migrating everything over—granted content and complexity of site ended up low.

I did not feel the same excitement when I started trying to use ready-made templates like sage—there was just too much to learn and the tooling to me varied. Although I wasn’t in a rush to get this project done, I wanted something that I can get up and running quickly and be ok to forget some concepts.

Syntax

I enjoy working with Markdown and so it was a no-brainer. It speeds up writing and mark up because it has all been toned down so writing lists was much more simplified and frees up time for content focus.

Support

I found the documentation for Jekyll/Liquid to be very useful and straight forward. The abundance of the gems I needed were readily available.

Since it doesn’t add too much around what HTML/JS does so quickly integrating jQuery was simple—normally is—but didn’t restrict me from applying my own best-practices.