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Jekyll - the best blog engine
Have you ever wanted to have a nice, simple to use free blog engine for developer? If have this post is especially for you.
Blog engine
I think that Jekyll is the best blog engine for programmer today. It has everything what you want as developer to write your thoughts down:
- simple template system
- markdown, html or textile templates with liquid includes and possibilities to add inline html
- code highlighting
- ability to extend system with plugins
- ready to use html templates (twitter, tom, the-program, the-minimum and mark-reid are available for now)
- permalink customization
- SEO features (meta tags, sitemap.xml, atom.xml are available out of box)
- tags supporting
- lightweight and fast
- without database
- without hosting headaches
- comments system out of box
- google analytics out of box
In the same time this blog engine is very simple and it generates static pages, so it works rather quickly. There is a just engine without any template and it available on GitHub but you can use ready templates. I prefer second variant to install it.
As a hosting jekyll get on well with github-pages. It is the simplest way to push your blog to the internet.
If you have blog on another engine (Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger/Blogspot, Mephisto, TextPattern, Typo 4+, Movable Type, Drupal or WordPress) you are able to migrate to this one very simple. How to do it you can find here.
Installation
I will describe here deployment process only to github pages. If you would like to deploy code to your server you should follow these instructions.
Firstly you should have account on the GitHub. If you don’t have one, sign up there. Then Create repository with name USERNAME.github.com.
$ git clone https://github.com/plusjade/jekyll-bootstrap.git USERNAME.github.com
$ cd USERNAME.github.com
$ git remote set-url origin [email protected]:USERNAME/USERNAME.github.com.git
$ git push origin master
After this actions you will have ready to use blog template. To write posts locally you should install jekyll gem.
Available actions with blog are:
rake page # Create a new page.
rake post # Begin a new post in ./_posts
rake preview # Launch preview environment
rake theme:install # Install theme
rake theme:package # Package theme
rake theme:switch # Switch between Jekyll-bootstrap themes.
By the way this blog is also based on jekyll-bootstrap. Really awesome blog engine, check it out!