Here’s another short ditty sneaking in from my currently busy life schedule. You know how it is with me and my family and Christmas. Busy, busy, busy.
While I’m still going through mySQL classes at Treehouse, I’m also currently learning how to build sites using other blogging platforms. I love WordPress and all, but sometimes the complexity and the bloat of the software platform can be overwhelming, especially with sites that only requires pure, simple blogging and nothing else. When I first opened my GitHub account sometime last year (or was it two years ago?), I discovered GitHub pages. I wanted to try it out by uploading my mini-portfolio, but I learned that it doesn’t support PHP, so I deleted it.
That’s where I discovered Jekyll, a new blogging platform that doesn’t use any databases and simply rely on flat files. Although this blogging platform is written using the Ruby language, Jekyll is completely run by using static HTML files based on the Liquid templating engine1 and the text-to-HTML converter Markdown. So in short, Jekyll is a very simple blogging platform that’s very human-friendly. You don’t even need to be a hardcore web developer just to create Jekyll-based blogs.
I started taking a Jekyll workshop class at Treehouse and so far I really like it. It’s very, very simple and it feels like you’re blogging the ancient old-school way,2 but a whole lot easier and a little bit more convenient. I thought about converting this blog alone to a Jekyll blog but I didn’t want to go through all of the complicated conversions, plus my database spans way back in 2008 that I also didn’t want to lose all of my blog posts from those many years ago. I have a blogging legacy, you know. But we’ll see what happens.
It’s possible to host Jekyll in my own web server, but using GitHub pages is very tempting to me. Again, we’ll see what happens.
And then there’s another lightweight blogging platform that’s primarily focused more towards blogging: Ghost. Ghost is written using JavaScript (node.js) and is created by someone who used to work for WordPress. He was frustrated with the major bloat that WordPress has become and felt that WordPress has lost its main focus, becoming more of a content management system rather than a blogging platform that he decided to venture out away on his own to build something that’s strictly for blogging. And thus, Ghost was born.
I haven’t tried Ghost yet, but eventually I may end up learning it. The reason being because I want to expand my knowledge with blogging platforms and that I want to give different options for my future clients regarding which type of website they want to have. After all, I used other different blogging platforms for my personal blogs and personal fan/project sites before WordPress.3 Why not learn more, right?
Once again, we’ll see what happens. Most likely I may stick with WordPress, but I’ll probably build mini sites that use either Jekyll or Ghost.
- If you’re familiar with Shopify, they made the Liquid templating engine and they’re using it to build/customize Shopify websites. [↩]
- before the early versions of Blogger became popular. When was that? Late 1990s-early 2000s? [↩]
- Blogger, Movable Type, the old and discontinued Greymatter, and unknown ones like Fan Update and CuteNews [↩]
