

The Immediate Future of Jekyll - parkr
http://blog.parkermoore.de/2012/12/18/the-immediate-future-of-jekyll/
Had a chat today with Tom Preston-Werner about the future of Jekyll. Here's what is in the works.
======
laktek
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 (<http://laktek.github.com/punch>), which can be easily customized to
run many different kinds of sites.

If you already have a blog based on Jekyll, but feels it takes forever to
build. Consider switching it to Punch with this boilerplate
(<https://github.com/laktek/punch-blog>). 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).

~~~
zimbatm
My preferred tool for marketing websites is <http://middlemanapp.com/> . On
top of handling the markdown, erb -> html generation it also takes care of
minifying of js and css, handles sass, less and setting image sizes
automatically. It's not my project but I really love it :)

------
minhajuddin
My annoyances with Jekyll from (<http://substancehq.com/why-substance>)

    
    
        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.
    

Substance (<http://substancehq.com/>) is a simple blogging engine / site
builder without any fluff. I created it to replace Jekyll for myself. Hope
others find it useful.

Also, it has ability to add custom data collections easily. If you want to
build a simple site, this comes in very handy.

~~~
dr_win
I'm also a heavy Jekyll user. I work on a Jekyll addon, which will allow live
site edits. Imagine static site generator executed on client-side:

<https://github.com/darwin/terraform>

The main trick is to use PhantomJS to pre-generate static site for initial
serving.

~~~
unicornporn
Fantastic, that would be a dream come true. A Jekyll site that I could update
even when I'm not at my own machine.

~~~
lukebaker
If you keep your Jekyll site on GitHub, you can edit your site in your browser
with Prose. I imagine you use GitHub for its Jekyll building and mirror the
built site elsewhere.

<http://prose.io/about.html>

------
yen223
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.

~~~
nbashaw
Actually more than 100 million. That's just the amount they raised from a16z

------
JasonFruit
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?

~~~
parkr
"Build time" means "generation time", or "compile time". It's the amount of
time it takes Jekyll to build the site from the source to the static HTML,
etc. Right now, it's really slow. If you have over 100 posts, it practically
warrants a coffee break. We have some developed some ideas about fixing this
issue.

~~~
PStamatiou
This, 1000x times. I have over 1200 posts on my blog
<http://paulstamatiou.com> and I've purposefully avoided stuff like
pagination, related posts (lsi) at the end of articles, tags/category pages
and other features due to slow time. I'm at about 60s on my Macbook Air now
which I can deal with.

But when I'm writing a blog post and I constantly want to preview it in the
browser (since lots of my posts have images and such I prefer seeing the real
layout than purely in sublime text 2) I use a rake task I have that stashes
every post but the one I'm working on so it only generates the one post.

Edit: and a faster generation time means I don't have to feel bad using lots
of liquid filters / includes (which can help clean things up and organize my
site).

Two things I'd like to see (which I've had to fork my jekyll for) and that
I'll put on the github:

\- "multiviews" support (it's how I get all my links to have no .html ending,
well that and some rack:rewrite rules)

\- support for different post types that are not in the main site.posts. I
only have 2 types now but for a while had a regular post, a shorter "aside"
style post that was not in the main feed nor homepage and had its own index
and feed, and another post type for photos. These go beyond just different
layouts. Though this is more of a CMS feature than a blog feature which may be
a direction thing that Jekyll is not intended for. ?

~~~
unicornporn
I read parkr's above comment and was about to search for your blog (where I
first read about the insane site generation times), but then I found your
comment just below. :)

------
arocks
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.

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.

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.

~~~
matthodan
You can add support for preprocessors like CoffeeScript to Jekyll fairly
easily via a plugin. I created Jekyll Asset Pipeline for this purpose.
[http://www.matthodan.com/2012/11/22/jekyll-asset-
pipeline.ht...](http://www.matthodan.com/2012/11/22/jekyll-asset-
pipeline.html)

------
thomasreggi
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
[http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-
campaigns-250-millio...](http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-
campaigns-250-million-fundraising-platform/). Jekyll is here to stay.

~~~
sudonim
Me too. I saw that article. I had been using jekyll for a while. Then I
decided to piece together how to replicate what the obama campaign did using
s3 and cloudfront: [http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Jekyll-S3-Cloudfront-Aname-
Root...](http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Jekyll-S3-Cloudfront-Aname-Root.html)

~~~
parkr
Why would you want to pay for people to come to your site? Don't you have to
pay Amazon for that bandwidth usage?

~~~
sudonim
I'm curious. Setting things like this up is my idea of fun. I use the same
technique for my business. I like static site hosting, and liked the idea of
things being speedy no matter where our customers are. Cloudfront does that
well.

As far as cost. I'm 30 and I don't like relying on free things. Github
probably wont go down, but I'd still rather pay. I set that up Dec 1st, served
100k pageviews. My Amazon bill right now is $1.25 (one dollar, twenty five
cents). Maybe that'll go up, but for what I'm doing, I doubt it will be that
expensive.

~~~
parkr
Hm, I didn't realize it was so inexpensive. I've only ever used S3 as a CDN
for a huge site with lots of images, so it was an expensive endeavor.

~~~
jvoorhis
I've run a Jekyll site from S3 with no difficulty, at a satisfactorily low
hosting cost. Cloudfront takes only minutes to setup, and the costs are
competitive, so I imagine it's a promising route.

------
jimmytucson
Anyone who doesn't know Ruby (like, at all) tried using Jekyll? How was your
experience?

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.

~~~
parkr
Using Jekyllwothout any ruby experience should be a snap. It's all controlled
by the CLI. You create posts and run `jekyll` and you're in business.

