Great post Luke. I’ve created this thing called muffin which is a jekyll template with bootstrap, sass, and grunt. It makes it super simple to set up a jekyll site. Check it out.
http://richbray.me/muffin/

@ Marco Campos:

Thank you sir. I will check it out.

@ astine:

Wow, nice list. I haven’t even heard of most of these. Thanks.

@ Chris Wellons:

Yeah, this site would probably take ages to compile. There ought to be an –incremental flag or something – that only processes files that have changed since last edit. Then gain, small edits can have cascading results due to the way Jekyll generates these pages, so that probably wouldn’t work.

Also, this is yet another example how Emacs is a fucking operating system. :P

I love Jekyll and use it for my own site, hosted by Github.

Another tip: Jekyll can automatically regenerate the site when a file changes, with --auto. Most of the time when editing a post I have Jekyll running with automatic regeneration.

I used to use the --server option, but the webserver provided by Jekyll isn’t very good. It can’t properly serve up HTML5 video files, for example. Right now I have Emacs do that job instead.

Also, Jekyll is very slooooooooow. My website takes about 2 minutes for my computer to compile from scratch, and almost as long for regeneration. This can make it a pain to make small CSS tweaks. I usually end up doing that in _site and copying it out when I’m happy. If you converted to Jekyll, I can’t imagine how long it would take to generate a site like this one, since you have probably thousands of posts. I only have under 167 posts.

As for getting started, when I moved from blosxom to Jekyll earlier this year, all I really had to do was change the template markers to Liquid’s (Jekyll’s) syntax. So I had already gone through the initial setup years ago.

The thing about static site generators like Jekyll is that there are a lot of them. Jekyll is only the most popular, (Mostly because of its association with Github.) Here’s a list of 32 of them and I know of at least one that’s not on that list. I use nanoc for my own site. I like it better than Jekyll because it exposes its innards more and lets me use ERB rather than Liquid.

One thing you want to do no matter which site generator you use is to place your source files in version control. This lets you easily keep a backup of your site and edit it as if it were local no matter where you are. It also allows you to rollback changes much more easily. This is one of the chief benefits of using a static site generator instead of a database backed system like WordPress or Drupal.

Also, the easiest way to comments is to just use something like Disqus for them.

Check out Octopress. Like it’s says on the website: “Octopress is an obsessively designed framework for Jekyll blogging. It’s easy to configure and easy to deploy.”