

Overview of Jekyll - a static site generator written in Ruby - basil
http://oiledmachine.com/posts/2008/12/27/overview-of-jekyll--a-static-site-generator-written-in-ruby.html

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mojombo
I'm the author of Jekyll and cofounder of GitHub. This is a great review of
Jekyll in its infancy. We're using Jekyll as part of the GitHub Pages stack,
and because Jekyll is a very young project, we're giving our customers a
chance to shape the future of this feature. If, after you read this article,
you find yourself trying out Jekyll and/or GitHub Pages, think about what else
you'd like to see included, and if your ideas (or code!) align with our goals,
I'll be happy to implement (or merge!) them in the project. I wrote Jekyll to
scratch my own itch, but now that it's in use by a broader audience, I'd like
to help you scratch yours as well.

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metajack
I switched my blog over to Jekyll last week. It feels much better to be using
Git and Emacs to manage the blog instead of random Web apps and crappy text
editors.

Since then the number of jekyll forks on GitHub has exploded. I've added
tagging, fixed numerous bugs, made the templating work a little better, and
added the ability to insert arbitrary script execution results (I use this to
generate the tag cloud on my site).

You can find my fork at http;//github.com/metajack/jekyll/tree/master

I've also written an MT -> Jekyll convertor and an MT -> Disqus convertor
which are at

<http://github.com/metajack/mt2jekyll/tree/master>

I imagine it will be a little while before the development free for all
settles down, but until then, it is easy to hack on and easy to grok.

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1gor
>The worst aspect in setting up this site was dealing with the templating
engine Liquid.

The article author should look at existing ruby/rake based static website
generator <http://webby.rubyforge.org>. It offers a choice of templating
languages (ERB, Textile, Markdown, HAML, SASS).

Another killer feature is webby's ability to process LaTeX snippets and
generate formula images for the web page.

So more templating choices and webby-like custom text processing filters
(LaTeX, graphviz, tidy, coderay etc) are my feature requests for Jekyll.

~~~
basil
One thing I can see that Webby supports that looks interesting is ERB. How
flexible is ERB as opposed to what seems like a more restricted templating
language like Liquid? It looks like ERB allows for actual Ruby to be used in
your templates which would have ultimately solved the issues I had.

~~~
1gor
ERB is simply embedded ruby, it has no limitations. It is also totally not
secure when used on a server.

My guess security of GitHub Pages is the reason for using Liquid in Jekyll.
For generating static pages on your desktop before uploading Liquid is simply
not needed.

I am a bit surprised jekyll is so heavily promoted as a static site tool(saw
it twice on HN front page already) while an elegant and seemingly more
powerful ruby application (webby) already exists for this purpose.

~~~
basil
From what I have just read about Webby, it seems like it does not support
topics and categories like Jekyll does. However it does have a wide range of
rake tasks which do some things like offer a variety of deployment options,
logging to growl, and validating links.

There are differences in the philosophies behind the 2 projects. They are both
static site generators however Jekyll is more oriented for maintaining blog-
style sites. Webby lacks the ability to organise content the way that Jekyll
does.

Perhaps most importantly, Jekyll is now available as a free, hosted solution
with GitHub - a great way of inviting the large community of developers active
in that community to contribute to the project.

I am not saying one is better than the other. They seem to accomplish slightly
different things although the method in which they go about it is somewhat
similar.

~~~
1gor
Sadly, you have not read enough before making your conclusions. Webby shines
with blogs, check <http://www.locomotivation.com> to see an example.

You can create a blog with two commands in webby:

    
    
       $ webby-gen blog "My Blog"
       ...
       $ webby blog:post "Nice weather today"
       [13:27:47]  INFO: creating content/blog/2008/index.txt
       [13:27:47]  INFO: creating content/blog/2008/12/index.txt
       [13:27:47]  INFO: creating content/blog/2008/12/28/nice-weather-today.txt
    

And it obviously does support categories/tags/article statuses etc. since you
can give any property to your page.

~~~
basil
Well if that's the case and if properties are available on a _site-wide basis_
like Jekyll's topics and categories are, then yes - it certainly seems very
capable and something I would like to have a crack at using.

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PStamatiou
I was actually quite interested in jekyll and was going to write a how to post
about getting it up and running.. enjoyed this post.

