Way back in November, 2008, I read an article by Tom Preston-Werner which detailed his approach to blogging and blogging software. For years I’ve been trying to use one terrible CMS or another. The idea of sitting down to write yet another CMS to tackle some of the issues I have with blogging software really didn’t appeal to me. Remembering his article, I started poking with Jekyll. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted:

  • Simplicity
  • CLI-based editing
  • Posts in a plaintext format, with formatting in a really lightweight markup language like Textile
  • Static content generation - if you post something popular, chances are you’re going to start flushing “dynamic” content out to disk as static HTML. Why bother waiting to write posts out as static files?
  • No comments — as far as I’m concerned, the effort required to manage spam and user comments simply isn’t worth it.