I started writing on a personal blog in November, 2006 and I choose a Wordpress instance at wordrpess.com at the time, because it was easy and it was free. My old blog consists of 79 articles in more than six years and considering the most of them are just suggested links or citations, it’s not much work in the end. Anyway, I’m trying to start this whole thing again so I registered a personal domain to host my stuff and take a look at Wordpress alternatives.

I think static HTML generators are the killer app for a developer with foolish writing ambitions (like me, you know). Such tools are terribly close to my everyday activities: edit your contents within a text editor, keep contents under version control, deploy stuff by pushing a certain branch to your remote, enjoy.

I’ve recently moved my company’s website to a static content generator written in Python and I wrote in six month the same amount of contents I wrote in the past three years of WYSIWYG blog engine. It works.

Why Jekyll? Well, it’s mainly because of GitHub pages. Provided that deploying a static site to GH Pages is terribly smooth and costs zero even with a custom domain name, if you write your contents with Jekyll GitHub generates the static pages from your source after every push on the master branch. Wow.

To be fair Jekyll is a very good product anyway, it’s well maintained, well documented and has an active community of users behind. Moreover, it’s so easy to use that even a Pythonista can feel comfortable with it :-).