Experiences with Jekyll (2016)

31 Oct 2016 by Friedrich Ewald · 2 min read

My first post on this blog was in December 2015 and since then, this blog is running with Jekyll. I want to take the time to summarize my experiences with Jekyll over the past year. The first thing I did, was creating a build script which I then used within a git-hook. The build script just runs jekyll build and then uses rsync to synchronize the changes to my webserver. This way, I can keep the webserver very light, serving only HTML, CSS and some JavaScript. This script is located in the root folder of the site.

Now, every time I write a new post, commit it, it will be automatically published on the web and the corresponding html sites will be updated. This also works for any change in any template file.Since I wanted to allow some dynamic content on my website, I added Disqus. This adds a comment box under each blog post via JavaScript. With this technique, I am able to keep the sites static but also allow feedback. The Javascript is added just before the closing body tag which keeps the loading times very low. Google Page Speed Insights rates this page currently with a score of 71/100 for mobile and 85/100 for desktop. This is obviously far away from the optimal solution and will be a topic in another post. What I can see so far, the changes to the code should be minor and can be easily integrated into the build script. The theme for this site is from the page Jekyllthemes. This page hosts a lot of open source themes for Jekyll which are ready to use. A theme consists of a bunch of files, which have to be places in the the main folder. An easy to understand tutorial can be found here. Overall my experience with Jekyll is very positive and it makes creating a website very easy. Of course one loses a lot of dynamic features, but the point that I don’t have to worry about any security issue ever, justifies this decision. Also, load times are much fast, especially on a shared server.

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