I’ve been contemplating the redesign of this site for quite a while. The original wheadon.us site was really just my blog, and not a very good one. The technology was BlogSphere V2.x running on Domino 6.5/Linux on a Pentium ii 400 or something like that. Although the hardware seemed to work adequately I was constantly concerned with what was going to fail and when.
The Blogsphere app didn’t really do what I wanted it to. It had some nice tricks like gravatars and some tracking of hits, etc. But then was lackluster in the actual posting interface. As a matter of fact to really get it to do what I wanted I would have to do my edits in a native Notes client, which made quick hit posts a pain. Anyway, I’m doing more Ruby/Rails and other stuff with my spare time now and was going to do the site with Scanty which uses Ruby and Sinatra and more. Well, as I got started in researching I pinged my programming asking him about a static page generator we had talked about many months ago. He turned me toward Jekyll. For a quick summary Jekyll is a static page generator. You develop your template and content in your favorite text editor and using just a few rules Jekyll will process a satisfactory site for you consisting of static html pages. This is really good (and lightning fast) since there are not SQL database calls nor on the fly server processing as it builds pages to be rendered by the browser. Static pages aren’t for the folks who NEED to generate dynamic web data… but my site needs non of that… there will be occasional posts, pictures, and maybe a calendar that is marshalled through Google.
Some people want the rich text editors and widgets like you get at Facebook and BlogSpot, but as a developer I’m very happy forging a quick few paragraphs in TextMate and letting Jekyll apply templates and process the little bit of markdown.
The templates I have used have their own credits sitting at the bottom of each page in keeping with the designer’s request to get linked back for credits, etc.
I’ll still do some Scanty/Sinatra stuff in the future because I do have some dynamic/interactive stuff I need to do with other sections of the Wheadon.US realm of sites… but not here… not now.
The Jekyll is now loose.
rich