Blogging is all about creating useful content in a form of blog posts or articles. But it seems that my work on this blog was much more focused on making the process of blogging simpler for me, than on delivering actual content. That’s why from time to time I was just jumping from one blogging platform to another trying to find a place for my own. And oops!… I did it again.
Static blogging
A while ago I discovered GitHub and its Pages. They simply allow to publish static content by pushing it into your git repository. But to make publishing easier they also added Jekyll — a simple static site generator, that allows to create page layouts and fill them with content taken from plain text files (written in pure HTML, Markdown or Textile).
Finally, blogging has become as simple and powerful as I always wanted it to be. I’m a (web) developer, I love git, I’m fast at command line and I feel comfortable in my text editor. And let’s be honest — as I don’t publish more than once a month — this blog is literally a static website.
So what you see here is a generated static HTML file and if you want to check the Markdown source of this post, you can find it on this blog’s GitHub repository.
If you wonder about the comments, there is also solution for this — pure JavaScript comment engines, that are getting more and more popular nowadays. After a (very) short research I’ve chosen Disqus, but that’s maybe a topic for some post in the future.
I’m not the only one
Am I crazy or something? This is really geeky to run a blog by building a static site from version control repository. But fortunately it seems that I’m not alone in my craziness. Recently UsabilityPost have been ported to Toto — that is a very close Jekyll’s cousin — and quite an interesting discussion has started about how this type of publishing fits into bloggers needs. On the other hand project’s wiki on GitHub provides also quite a long list of sites that are using Jekyll.
In my opinion tools like Jekyll and Toto make blogging really simple and straightforward, but only for real geeks. Web developers, programmers, maybe also some of web designers work with text editors and command line on a daily basis, so this way of publishing nicely fit into their work-flows. This will never become a tool for everyone, but it’s not bad, as it was never meant to be that.
Everyone should find a tool that best suits them and I think I just found one. If you are OK with your Blogger or Wordpress that’s just fine — I’ll stick to my text editor, command line and git. And let’s hope it will finally make me focused on blogging…
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