This is my first post using the Jekyll platform. Jekyll isn’t actually much of a platform, it’s just a system that converts markdown (or other markup languages) into static HTML files. It’s nice for two reasons:
When a browser visits this site, there are no database lookups. Jekyll converts everything into static HTML when the site is deployed. When a browser requests pages on this site, no time spent on server processing, only on sending the HTML files through the network. This makes pages load times much faster.
Editing blog posts with your local text editor is much more pleasant. After using Textmate with syntax highlighting to edit markdown files, I can’t imagine going back to a browser window. Also, creating new posts is just a matter of creating a new file in a text editor.
Migrating to Jekyll was a little painful: The permalink structure changed, which made migrating Disqus comments difficult. But Disqus have a nice API that lets you use declare the old urls in the Javascript API which lets you use the old comments.
Another slight annoyance is that any changes, even small edits, require a site redeploy. Right now redeploying the site (which involves rebuilding all the pages) takes about 10 seconds. Definitely not as simple as a ‘save’ form button.
Overall Jekyll is a very elegant system and I’m impressed. I’d recommend it to anyone who writes the occasional blog post and doesn’t need anything heavier.