Jekyll is pretty neat

21 Jan 2025

I wanted to simplify the way my personal website worked. With a little prior setup, Jekyll allows me to write my content in Markdown and deploy straight to the web. This saves having to write every page by hand or run an inefficient CMS like Wordpress. Woop.

The Setup

I tossed Ruby onto my Mac mini homelab server running Ubuntu. The site is built there with Jekyll, then deployed to the web via GitHub Pages.

While I initially wanted to use the default Minima theme that comes with Jekyll, I wasn’t able to find that v3 of this theme was available with GitHub Pages. And everything useful is in that v3 release.

After spending way too much time on that, I just rebuilt my own basic theme by importing Bootstrap from their CDN into my Jekyll layouts. This should be good enough and keeps things pretty generic and modular in case I do something else later.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages are neat. No need for a full fat webhost, and it adds version control to everything. Double woop. 😁

Final Thoughts

The setup was a bit of a pain — especially given that the default theme is largely unusable (or I’m too dense to figure it out) - but it still beats running Wordpress.