Daniel Roy Greenfeld

Daniel Roy Greenfeld

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Tried out Jekyll

Why Jekyll?

I've had issues with Blogger for some time. After my fiancee, Audrey Roy, moved her blog to https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll, I was impressed enough to give it a try.

Why did it impress me?

Code highlighting made easy

I don't have to hand-craft HTML code to get google prettify in a post. I just stick in a simple macro of 'highlight python' called like a Django templatetag and I get:

name = 'Daniel Greenfeld'
for letter in name.split():
    print(letter)

This issue alone sums up why I don't do more blog posts with code.

I don't want to maintain my own blog site

A couple times I rolled out a blog on a site I stood up, but didn't really feel like maintaining a site. I want someone else to do it. When I write, I want someone else to worry about the details. I want to focus on writing and nothing else.

I want to be able to write without connection

I need an internet connection to get my blogger posts to format right. With Jekyll, I can just type away.

Ability to publish via git

My https://pydanny-event-notes.rtfd.org has really exploded in my own usage and continued because it uses the same patterns I use in software development. I'm used to the pattern of using Git to push up content, so why use naked HTML? Sure, there are RST-to-HTML processors that I could use to generate that HTML, but they always require an some amount of manual correction. Jekyll, and it's alternatives,let me just write.

Why not Jekyll?

Jekyll is written in ruby. Nothing against ruby, but I can't trivially work in that language the way I can in Python. It's good to eat your own dogfood.

So I started looking at hyde, blogofile, and pelican as alternatives. More on that later.


Tags: ruby blog
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