Last spring I combined my blog and personal site into a new one. I used a WordPress install, like I had on my old blog. Partly because that's what I had used before, and partly because I was doing a lot of WordPress stuff at work. I made my own theme for it using Timber, a Twig plugin for WordPress.
Goodbye WordPress
I was never very pleased with the results. The design was maybe a bit rushed, and didn't look good on some screen sizes. But mostly I felt like WordPress was a huge overkill for the site. WordPress definitely has it's uses, but I like to keep things simple.
Hello Jekyll
So I went from one extreme to the other it seems. I decided to re-write the whole thing with Jekyll. Jekyll is a static website generator that is "blog aware". It's written in Ruby which I don't know at all, a bit of a strange choice as there are at least a dozen of different very similar alternatives. Some of them probably written in a language I know.
But I chose Jekyll because it seems fairly popular, and it understand a lot of formats, including Markdown, one of my favourite markup languages.
Why Markdown
What makes Markdown so special? There are really two reasons for it. Many languages do one of the other, but Markdown combines them both.
- Markdown is simple. It is meant to write text with, and it only has a few options when it comes to formatting. Having too many options is something I really dislike with Wysiwyg editors, they allow you to choose your own formatting when you write. I'm a strong believer in separating the writing process from the formatting and layout. It also helps with accidental copy/paste formatting.
- It looks good. Any web developer worth anything is fairly fluent in reading HTML, and you can even make HTML look pretty good if you use it to only contain the contents, and leave the formatting to CSS. But Markdown is designed to be readable in text form, and thus it also works as a sort of formatting guide for text files.