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Jekyll is rocking my new blog!

Published on 2011/11/18 by @johnnyhalife. Be cool leave a comment

Long gone Wordpress days have gone. Previously, I used to have my blog here, under Southworks blogs, that are currently hosted using Wordpress but I decided to move on.

I found myself frustrated with the way we publish on our blogs, like: WYSIWYG editors, Windows Live Writer, among others. My creative process it's much more rudimentary: I basically open TextMate and words start flowing, then when I need to get it posted on Wordpress is when the "I'll never publish it" moment appears.

Writing is something that I enjoy, it's something that comes and goes from my mind but I need to get better at it too. I really like writing, although I might not have lot of interesting things to share, I take it as an exercise.

Since excuses are easy, I wanted to remove one layer of frustration and that's why I created this new blog.

What did I do?

I found that Mojombo from Github has a project called "Jekyll" this is (to simplify) a git-based blog engine. You write using HTML/Markdown and then you push it to your app (and the full site gets regenerated).

With Jekyll I got what I wanted: an easy to use publishing platform that it's extensible enough so I can hack my own shit.

The theme you're looking at right now it's based on Bootstrap, from Twitter. I wanted an easy and clean UI and Bootstrap gave me a great starting point.

Comments were something I was intrigued by, but then I remember that my friend Drew Robbins mentioned disqus and I loved it. Basically I've outsourced my commenting platform and the service I'm getting is awesome.

Last but not least, hosting was something I need to solve, and I ended up using Heroku (for free!) with the new amazing cedar platform. Creating the site you're seeing this hosted was as easy as:

?> sudo gem install heroku 

# it's important to mention the stack in here
?> heroku create johnnyhalife-blog --stack cedar

And then you need your Gemfile with Jekyll and its dependencies (RedCloth at least). Since we are using cedar stack, we'll need to craft a Procfile (I've already published mine on github). It's not rocket science, your Procfile should look like 

web:  jekyll --server $PORT

Round up

Throughout all this process (that only took me a day) I've learnt lots of new things, so I thought it would be cool if "open source my blog" and I pushed it to github. You can easily clone it, and use it as a base for your own. What you will get:

That's pretty much the story behind my brand new blog, how, why and when.

thanks,
~johnny

johnny g halife
buenos aires argentina