Intro

It’s been a while since I’ve had a blog, but I wanted to make a spot to share some things I’ve been working on that may be useful to the broader community. It’s time to give back to the open source community.

Details

The blog itself is hosted on github, using github pages and jekyll. There are a lot of compelling reasons to use this, but here are some of mine:

• It’s free
• The site is rebuilt automatically on every checkin. This means that you also get a code history for free.
• It’s a good opportunity to become more familiar with git, github, and markdown.
• Jekyll gives you a lot of the benefits of a dynamic site (templates/partials, site-wide variables, etc.), but with the speed and security of a static site.
• At some point, I may need to update some yaml files and maybe a bit of html if jekyll makes some big changes, but this is much less onerous than updating some monstrous and fragile php codebase.

Conclusion

One of the reasons I stopped blogging so long ago was because my php based sites kept getting hacked. I kept them up to date, but it was never enough and it was endlessly frustrating. I love databases; I love dynamic websites (although I prefer the dynamism to be on the client side), but that level of complexity and maintenance is not needed for me to jot down some random thoughts. Jekyll, so far, seems to be just the answer for me.