7 ms·

Creating a minimalist blog with Jekyll Now

90 points by flamecoals 5y ago

bravura 5y ago
Jekyll Now seems great, but there has been no github activity since 2018. Are there more actively maintained alternatives?
- Helmut10001 5y ago
  Both Hugo and mkdocs appear to receive more updates than Jekyll these days. I was in the same situation as the author and decided for mkdocs, because it features better syntax highlighting and customization than hugo. I find it also better to read for long documentation-like posts (have a look du.nkel.dev). There are less themes available compared to Hugo, but those that exist feel more powerful and complete.
  - flamecoals 5y ago
    (author here) yes, the lack of updates is concerning. Interesting, I will check mkdocs out!
  - fossuser 5y ago
    Yeah - I’m still on Jekyll because of built in GitHub pages support, but if I was starting today I’d probably use Hugo.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Last time I was evaluating static site generators, Dimples and Nanoc both stood out for this recent-updates reason, among other personal criteria. https://github.com/waferbaby/dimples https://github.com/waferbaby/dimples https://nanoc.ws/ https://nanoc.ws/
- MisterBiggs 5y ago
  https://jamstack.org/generators/ https://jamstack.org/generators/ is a great list of static site generators.
- gumby 5y ago
  Are updates needed?
  - flamecoals 5y ago
    They might be. I tried running it locally with the latest ruby LTS and ran into errors. It only worked with Ruby 2.7. However, what isn't clear is if we need to discard the whole project and go to another one or just help the maintainers. I will see if I can help.
  - thitcanh 5y ago
    Maintenance is certainly useful even if there are no new features. I doubt the project is bug-free so no updates means no bugfixes either.
patates 5y ago
I find creating a site with next.js then making a static export much easier and much more customizable than your typical ssg. I'd love to hear other opinions though.
kenneth 5y ago
If I have just one piece of feedback here it would be: body { padding: 10px; } Changing nothing else but this would make the site 10x better. Even a Terminal window has 5+px of padding.
- flamecoals 5y ago
  Good point! Done!
- edjw 5y ago
  body { font-size: 18px; } would help with squinting as well
marban 5y ago
The real problem with any SSG is where to host and edit Markdown files and images for flexible spur of the moment content creation. I've built my own Wordpress-export-to-static solution to use the native iOS App as a workaround but it feels somewhat clunky — Same with having to run a headless CMS for this in the background; Surprisingly with all the gazillion of MD editors, no one has ever built one with live editing files in, say, S3 + allowing to upload assets. And no, I don't consider content composition in a terminal window to be an inspiring environment because I'm a sucker for aesthetic apps. Addendum: Mobile is just an added bonus. Best solution for me would be iA Writer as an editor, native image upload to a bucket like S3 and Apple allowing me to tap into these iCloud hosted .md files via an API. Then use a simple script to put the pieces together and move the stuff to Netlify or wherever.
- edem 5y ago
  Have you tried Next.js?
- cpach 5y ago
  Good point. However, there is so much innovation in this space right now so I’m pretty sure that something like what you described will emerge.
  - Helmut10001 5y ago
    The combination of Typora (https://typora.io/ https://typora.io/) for writing markdown + `mkdocs serve` or `hugo serve` is pretty neat. Set up a gitlab-ci.yml that builds and pushes the final site to your hosted destination, that's it.
    - marban 5y ago
      Image upload in Typora is done via some random hosting service IIRC.
      - Helmut10001 5y ago
        Typora is a markdown editor. Hosting is done in Github, Gitlab etc. Typora is not a hosting solution afaik.
wavesplash 5y ago
Consider using the regular Jekyll at https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/ (the Jekyll Now fork is no longer maintained)
- geraldbauer 5y ago
  FYI: Here's my little minimialist starter kit called Hello, Minima! - Get Started w/ GitHub Pages (Jekyll) in 60 Seconds using the Minima (Gem-Packaged) Theme [1]. [1]: https://github.com/henrythemes/hello-minima-theme https://github.com/henrythemes/hello-minima-theme
- flamecoals 5y ago
  I will! I am going to add a note to the post letting people know. Maybe we can create a similar functionality that Jekyll Now had of forking the repo and having a github page right away.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  We run https://www.shoto.io https://www.shoto.io completely on Jekyll. Until now, all modifications we needed were possible. I wonder if it is super future proof though. Once we start expanding the site with new features we might start "abusing" the setup. In any case, I think the data is stored as MD and thus it can be probably easily migrated.
slk500 5y ago
txt file + org mode export - simple & easy to edit
saagarjha 5y ago
I am somewhat confused by this blog post, as GitHub directly renders Jekyll sites by default–no GitHub Actions or fiddling required. Is there a reason why this was not the right fit?
- flamecoals 5y ago
  (author here) I did not know that :P. I thought it was an action because it behaved like one, but you are right, it is a built-in feature on github. This also makes using mainline Jekyll a much better alternative. I will correct the post and follow up updating it from Jekyll now to Jekyll. I used this built-in support thinking it was an action :P
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Depends on your build I guess. We compile things like TailwindCSS in our build. Not sure if that's supported outside of Actions.
- BelenusMordred 5y ago
  Was under the impression you can't use Github pages for commercial use? Not sure how heavily that is enforced.
  - febeling 5y ago
    This is GitHub's wording in the Pages docs: > GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#prohibited-uses https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github... To me that sounds like a blog would be fine.
paxys 5y ago
> Instead of using a hosted service like Facebook or Medium, as I strongly believe in a decentralized web So you put it on Github..
- eloisant 5y ago
  The way he's using Github is as a basic host, he could move to a different service and the blog would look the same, the URLs still work, and the visitors couldn't tell the difference. That's day and night compared to publishing on Facebook or Medium.
- flamecoals 5y ago
  (author here) Good point, but I still believe it is much better to use your own domain and have control of the whole html. Sadly because of the infrastructure currently available there is a balance between usability and centralization (but I don't think it needs to be this way). In the end, github page is being a commodity service, I could easily replace with any major provider to host the same website and users wouldn't even notice. If I wanted to be extremely radical I could host it on my personal machine on my house, but latency and availability would suffer. If I used a service like CloudFlare to improve it, we are back to centralization. Sadly, there isn't a black and white answer here.
rsanheim 5y ago
I dig the theme, its clean and old school. One bit of feedback: you should bump up the overall font size and do a relative max-width, maybe 70%. I bumped up zoom by two to get things readable on my MacBook. Much of your audience will be on screens that are at least 1200 pixels wide, so forcing folks to ~12pt / 600px ends up w/ things being pretty small and cramped.
- flamecoals 5y ago
  Great feedback, I will experiment with your suggestions, thanks!
dhruvhp 5y ago
I wanted to do something similar, but I found Jekyll quite bloated. Pelican didn't work for syntax highlighting. I found Hugo the best. My current stack is Hugo with terminal theme hosted on GitHub pages.
- type0 5y ago
  Yeah, and if you ever wish to bloat up your Hugo install, there's always Hugo extended for that.
hasjekyll 5y ago
What's wrong with hugo + self-hosted nginx on a VPS?
- nesarkvechnep 5y ago
  Should there be anything wrong?
- robjan 5y ago
  Now you have to keep patching a server for a static site
- Pawka 5y ago
  Author's case eliminates the "self-hosted nginx on a VPS" part. While there is no big difference (just a personal preference) if Hugo, Jekyll or other tool is being used to generate HTML from Markdown.
  - hasjekyll 5y ago
    Ah, thanks, I missed that. I also somehow missed the “Just work” requirement which could rule out hugo. In my experience it requires quite a bit of tinkering to get going.
jordanmorgan10 5y ago
Jekyll has been a dream for me, used it for about four years now. The problems I have with it are generally solvable on my own, but haven't quite passed that threshold where I want to take the time to solve them (i.e. a plugin for autocomplete for things like layouts, includes, etc).
jrm4 5y ago
Old school perhaps, but most everything here feels wildly overengineered for a static site. If the site is truly static, then there's no need for any server or client web languages at all. You need HTML (with perhaps some sort of generator), CSS, and e.g. rsync. I've been doing mine with http://zim-wiki.org http://zim-wiki.org for years
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
read this whole post out of curiosity about what the heck Jekyll Now was...and then scratched head about why author wasn't just utilizing the github pages platform...aka hosted Jekyll.... c'mon get in touch man

90 points by flamecoals 5y ago

Jekyll Now seems great, but there has been no github activity since 2018. Are there more actively maintained alternatives?

Helmut10001 5y ago
Both Hugo and mkdocs appear to receive more updates than Jekyll these days. I was in the same situation as the author and decided for mkdocs, because it features better syntax highlighting and customization than hugo. I find it also better to read for long documentation-like posts (have a look du.nkel.dev). There are less themes available compared to Hugo, but those that exist feel more powerful and complete.
- flamecoals 5y ago
  (author here) yes, the lack of updates is concerning. Interesting, I will check mkdocs out!
- fossuser 5y ago
  Yeah - I’m still on Jekyll because of built in GitHub pages support, but if I was starting today I’d probably use Hugo.
themodelplumber 5y ago
Last time I was evaluating static site generators, Dimples and Nanoc both stood out for this recent-updates reason, among other personal criteria. https://github.com/waferbaby/dimples https://github.com/waferbaby/dimples https://nanoc.ws/ https://nanoc.ws/
MisterBiggs 5y ago
https://jamstack.org/generators/ https://jamstack.org/generators/ is a great list of static site generators.
gumby 5y ago
Are updates needed?
- flamecoals 5y ago
  They might be. I tried running it locally with the latest ruby LTS and ran into errors. It only worked with Ruby 2.7. However, what isn't clear is if we need to discard the whole project and go to another one or just help the maintainers. I will see if I can help.
- thitcanh 5y ago
  Maintenance is certainly useful even if there are no new features. I doubt the project is bug-free so no updates means no bugfixes either.

patates 5y ago

I find creating a site with next.js then making a static export much easier and much more customizable than your typical ssg. I'd love to hear other opinions though.

kenneth 5y ago

If I have just one piece of feedback here it would be: body { padding: 10px; } Changing nothing else but this would make the site 10x better. Even a Terminal window has 5+px of padding.

flamecoals 5y ago
Good point! Done!
edjw 5y ago
body { font-size: 18px; } would help with squinting as well

marban 5y ago

The real problem with any SSG is where to host and edit Markdown files and images for flexible spur of the moment content creation. I've built my own Wordpress-export-to-static solution to use the native iOS App as a workaround but it feels somewhat clunky — Same with having to run a headless CMS for this in the background; Surprisingly with all the gazillion of MD editors, no one has ever built one with live editing files in, say, S3 + allowing to upload assets. And no, I don't consider content composition in a terminal window to be an inspiring environment because I'm a sucker for aesthetic apps. Addendum: Mobile is just an added bonus. Best solution for me would be iA Writer as an editor, native image upload to a bucket like S3 and Apple allowing me to tap into these iCloud hosted .md files via an API. Then use a simple script to put the pieces together and move the stuff to Netlify or wherever.

edem 5y ago
Have you tried Next.js?
cpach 5y ago
Good point. However, there is so much innovation in this space right now so I’m pretty sure that something like what you described will emerge.
- Helmut10001 5y ago
  The combination of Typora (https://typora.io/ https://typora.io/) for writing markdown + `mkdocs serve` or `hugo serve` is pretty neat. Set up a gitlab-ci.yml that builds and pushes the final site to your hosted destination, that's it.
  - marban 5y ago
    Image upload in Typora is done via some random hosting service IIRC.
    - Helmut10001 5y ago
      Typora is a markdown editor. Hosting is done in Github, Gitlab etc. Typora is not a hosting solution afaik.

wavesplash 5y ago

Consider using the regular Jekyll at https://jekyllrb.com/ https://jekyllrb.com/ (the Jekyll Now fork is no longer maintained)

geraldbauer 5y ago
FYI: Here's my little minimialist starter kit called Hello, Minima! - Get Started w/ GitHub Pages (Jekyll) in 60 Seconds using the Minima (Gem-Packaged) Theme [1]. [1]: https://github.com/henrythemes/hello-minima-theme https://github.com/henrythemes/hello-minima-theme
flamecoals 5y ago
I will! I am going to add a note to the post letting people know. Maybe we can create a similar functionality that Jekyll Now had of forking the repo and having a github page right away.
shoto_io 5y ago
We run https://www.shoto.io https://www.shoto.io completely on Jekyll. Until now, all modifications we needed were possible. I wonder if it is super future proof though. Once we start expanding the site with new features we might start "abusing" the setup. In any case, I think the data is stored as MD and thus it can be probably easily migrated.

slk500 5y ago

txt file + org mode export - simple & easy to edit

saagarjha 5y ago

I am somewhat confused by this blog post, as GitHub directly renders Jekyll sites by default–no GitHub Actions or fiddling required. Is there a reason why this was not the right fit?

flamecoals 5y ago
(author here) I did not know that :P. I thought it was an action because it behaved like one, but you are right, it is a built-in feature on github. This also makes using mainline Jekyll a much better alternative. I will correct the post and follow up updating it from Jekyll now to Jekyll. I used this built-in support thinking it was an action :P
shoto_io 5y ago
Depends on your build I guess. We compile things like TailwindCSS in our build. Not sure if that's supported outside of Actions.
BelenusMordred 5y ago
Was under the impression you can't use Github pages for commercial use? Not sure how heavily that is enforced.
- febeling 5y ago
  This is GitHub's wording in the Pages docs: > GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github-pages/about-github-pages#prohibited-uses https://docs.github.com/en/pages/getting-started-with-github... To me that sounds like a blog would be fine.

paxys 5y ago

> Instead of using a hosted service like Facebook or Medium, as I strongly believe in a decentralized web So you put it on Github..

eloisant 5y ago
The way he's using Github is as a basic host, he could move to a different service and the blog would look the same, the URLs still work, and the visitors couldn't tell the difference. That's day and night compared to publishing on Facebook or Medium.
flamecoals 5y ago
(author here) Good point, but I still believe it is much better to use your own domain and have control of the whole html. Sadly because of the infrastructure currently available there is a balance between usability and centralization (but I don't think it needs to be this way). In the end, github page is being a commodity service, I could easily replace with any major provider to host the same website and users wouldn't even notice. If I wanted to be extremely radical I could host it on my personal machine on my house, but latency and availability would suffer. If I used a service like CloudFlare to improve it, we are back to centralization. Sadly, there isn't a black and white answer here.

rsanheim 5y ago

I dig the theme, its clean and old school. One bit of feedback: you should bump up the overall font size and do a relative max-width, maybe 70%. I bumped up zoom by two to get things readable on my MacBook. Much of your audience will be on screens that are at least 1200 pixels wide, so forcing folks to ~12pt / 600px ends up w/ things being pretty small and cramped.

flamecoals 5y ago
Great feedback, I will experiment with your suggestions, thanks!

dhruvhp 5y ago

I wanted to do something similar, but I found Jekyll quite bloated. Pelican didn't work for syntax highlighting. I found Hugo the best. My current stack is Hugo with terminal theme hosted on GitHub pages.

type0 5y ago
Yeah, and if you ever wish to bloat up your Hugo install, there's always Hugo extended for that.

hasjekyll 5y ago

What's wrong with hugo + self-hosted nginx on a VPS?

nesarkvechnep 5y ago
Should there be anything wrong?
robjan 5y ago
Now you have to keep patching a server for a static site
Pawka 5y ago
Author's case eliminates the "self-hosted nginx on a VPS" part. While there is no big difference (just a personal preference) if Hugo, Jekyll or other tool is being used to generate HTML from Markdown.
- hasjekyll 5y ago
  Ah, thanks, I missed that. I also somehow missed the “Just work” requirement which could rule out hugo. In my experience it requires quite a bit of tinkering to get going.

jordanmorgan10 5y ago

Jekyll has been a dream for me, used it for about four years now. The problems I have with it are generally solvable on my own, but haven't quite passed that threshold where I want to take the time to solve them (i.e. a plugin for autocomplete for things like layouts, includes, etc).

jrm4 5y ago

Old school perhaps, but most everything here feels wildly overengineered for a static site. If the site is truly static, then there's no need for any server or client web languages at all. You need HTML (with perhaps some sort of generator), CSS, and e.g. rsync. I've been doing mine with http://zim-wiki.org http://zim-wiki.org for years

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

read this whole post out of curiosity about what the heck Jekyll Now was...and then scratched head about why author wasn't just utilizing the github pages platform...aka hosted Jekyll.... c'mon get in touch man