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Jekyll + GitHub Pages: looking for the perfect blog platform

[ jekyll github-pages markdown ]

I don’t remember when I started blogging. Probably 10-12 years ago. I used several online systems. Last one was Wordpress. It has several cons.:

  • It’s not easy to switch/jump from wordpress.com to another hosting.
  • It’s not easy to backup all posts/content as a set of source files/records.
  • There are some limitations of layout and visual editor.
  • It puts some ads right into my content. Generally, it’s a cost of free hosting/service, but I don’t like it anyway.

I don’t need a lot of features, just regular posts publishing with SEO. Jekyll, Gatsby or Hugo provides static blogging cases out of the box. As GitHub Pages already provides Jekyll as a service, and even for free, so, it looks like the best way.

I found simple theme and compose Jekyll project based on it. Jekyll is the system to create and maintain static web sites. It’s implemented by ruby and has a lot of plugins as ruby gems. Text content is composed and saved in source files. I use markdown format. There is powerful styles and layout systems. Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs:

  • Markdown for content
  • YAML for data
  • Liquid for templating