Last summer, I created the posts that I had reposted/shared on this blog. Originally posted on Wordpress, these posts represented a small webset of thoughts that had come up over those months. Since then, I’ve decided to give blogging another try with this Jekyll/Octopress blog. But to be completely truthful, part of the excitement is using a static site generator in the blogging, adding a bit if a developer flair to the whole process as well.
Why Jekyll/Octopress?
There are a few key advantages to using Jekyll/Octopress as opposed to a standard blog system (such as Wordpress). My initial blogging attempt with Wordpress was essentially a plug and play theme. This essentially left no room for customization. The only way to achieve this type of customization was to find hosting space as well, making it slower/more computationally demanding. With a static generator like Jekyll, this computation is avoided and mostly pushed over to the only times you actually need to do it, when you make changes. Further, the setup for Jekyll and Octopress was extremely simple. The documentation and tutorials were easy and intuitive to follow, and the file system is well organized and easy to make the changes you want.
Additionally, being able to write posts within a text editor using markdown and alter the configurations pretty easily in various config files is an attractive process. The ease and flexibility achieved by this is huge given the much slower overhead/limitations of a wordpress hosted blog. Which brings me to the final point of free github pages hosting. The deploy and source system is pretty clever, separating deployment public code (the static pages that are generated) and the source code that creates it. Simply maintaining two parallel branches of equivalent code clearly separates what is being hosted with the files needed to generate it, creating a nice and simple backup system.
Hopefully, these advantages and others continue to prove their utility and this blog becomes a nice hub for ideas and thoughts to be documented. =)
