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Simplicity in Everything |
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This website is now created using Jekyll. Originally, I had used Joomla, a big, industrial-strength content management system.
Joomla worked well for a while, but I quickly reached a point where I found myself unable to do, what should have been, simple things. For example, I couldn't see any obvious way of extracting all the text from my posts -- it was stored in a database somewhere. There was no simple way to test changes to my site locally because I couldn't see how everything pieced together. It was just too complex for something that should have been very simple.
So I got thinking about what would be the simplest way to generate my website.
Well, what is my website? It's just a collection of pages with the same layout, but with different blobs of text inserted in the middle for each post. I'd also like to generate some lists: recent posts, related posts, that kind of thing.
Ideally, what I want is something that transforms this
{% highlight html %}
{{ "{{ page.content "}}}} {% endhighlight %}into this
{% highlight html %}
This website is now created using Jekyll...
... {% endhighlight %}That's exactly what Jekyll does. It just goes through all your pages and uses Liquid to transform them into a static site. Don't believe me? The entire source for this site is on GitHub.
To test my website locally, I just run jekyll --server and head on
over to http://0.0.0.0:4000. To deploy, I just run jekyll && rsync ..., which generates the site and copies it over to my remote server.
That's it.
Why can't everything be this simple?