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Ask HN: Who is using Jekyll? (+feedback)

10 points by apsurd ↗ HN
Just recently got interested in Jekyll to power my blog pursuits. I've decided to dedicate my efforts to the Jekyll platform.

With that said I'm interested in how many people are actively using Jekyll.

IMO using Jekyll is an uphill battle even though its 3+ years old. There aren't any definitive "quickstart" tutorials or frameworks. Liquid syntax is a pain to use (from a programmer's perspective) and the docs could use a lot more step-by-step direction.

My work will involve addressing these issues with my ultimate goal being to convince more technical people to contribute their thoughts to the Internet.

Please promote your Jekyll blog here and list any main issues you have with Jekyll.

14 comments

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akg
I've been using jekyll with linode quite successfully. Haven't really had any problems. I did have to make some modifications to the Jekyll source to modify the way it finds posts (I don't like that it only looks for posts that have dates in the filenames). Other than that it's been working quite great!

Here is a full description of how I am using Jekyll:

http://www.akashkgarg.com/uncat/anatomy.html

guptaneil
I recently switched my site[1] over to Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages, and am very satisfied. The easiest way to get started is to fork Tom Preston-Werner's Jekyll blog[2], modify the layout as you'd like, and then populate your blog posts. This way, you can jump right in and then learn more about the intricacies of Jekyll as you go.

1: http://blog.metamorphium.com

2: http://tom.preston-werner.com/

robbiet480
I'm using Jekyll on my dedicated server and absolutely love it. I customized it fully too. I added in Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Readability and Instagram, along with a Konami Code easter egg :P. I then tuned it fully so its very fast. Overall, I am very happy that I am using Jekyll.

My site: http://robbie.io

The GitHub repo for my site: http://github.com/robbiet480/robbie.io

swanson
I feel your pain with getting setup with Jekyll. I've been using it for a little over a year for my blog that is hosted with Github Pages.

I am pretty happy with my setup (finally) - I've got blog posts and book reviews, but also talk slides generated with Showoff. I use categories in the Front Matter for grouping the three types of content.

The nice part is that now that I've done the setup work, I've had friends and co-workers just fork my blog, clear out the _posts folder and start writing (and hopefully re-style at some point).

My main pain points are around the required dates in the filenames and the lack of documentation/examples for using the Template Data. It would be nice for RSS feeds to be built-in as well.

https://github.com/swanson/swanson.github.com

jasonz
http://octopress.org/

octopress is pretty sweet.

rake new_post["title"] and you have a new post.

easy to style as well.

swanson
I don't know about octopress - I don't get who the customer is. That rake script can be done in like 15 lines of any scripting language (I wrote my own in about 10 minutes). I don't have any issues styling my stock Jekyll blog.

If you are using a static blog site over something like WordPress you are probably technical in nature and can pretty easily setup your own Jekyll site. The only benefit I see personally are the plugins - which you can't even use on Github Pages as far as I know.

IMO octopress is a solution looking for a problem.

apsurd
Definitely agree with this. Octopress definitely launched with momentum but it relies on a fork of Jekyll and custom plugins.

This necessarily means GitHub can never merge any developments upstream even if they wanted to since GitHub needs Jekyll for GitHub pages.

My main concern right now is moving Jekyll forward which is a lot more frustrating of a problem since I want to make improvements that will work natively on GitHub pages. My first solution to this will be the use of a lot of javascript =), with the requirement that it degrade gracefully.

Plugin development is still worthwhile since from the replies it seems a good amount of blogs are self-hosted. The trick is to properly separate and advocate the plugin self-hosted format from the deploy to gitHub super easy quickstart format.

swanson
I can't speak for the self-hosted side of things, but two underutilized features for github hosted Jekyll blogs that I think could be really neat are Pull Requests (for comments, typo corrections, or collaborative blogs i.e. AltDevBlogADay) and the GitHub API (ability to query the files in the repo akin to a SQL database for Wordpress, OAuth with the Github sign in button, and using Javascript to create posts via commits).

The collaborative blog via pull requests seems to align with your mission of getting more technical experts writing on the web - the steps to getting a post published: write it in Markdown and submit a Pull Request. You could have an Editor comment on the post in the pull request, offer suggestions/corrections etc, then merge into the main blog repo.

apsurd
Thanks for the AltDevBlogADay reference. I hadn't heard of this.

Your suggestions seem spot on. I hadn't thought to incorporate the GitHub api for collaborative features like you outline.

I had an idea for a reputation system backed by GitHub auth. Basically any githubber can upvote an article as a kind of endorsement. The idea being that a reader can trust the source content a bit more knowing it has x upvotes or what not. It's just an idea at this point and would have to work with a lot of javascript/jsonp/widget stuff going on.

But back to your collaboration suggestions, yes definitely something I'm writing down! Hopefully working with native GitHub integration will spur more adoption.

ZephyrP
I used jekyll to build zv.github.com and I also hate Liquid. Markdown is the ticket. The source is of course available on github.