How I met Jekyll

Jekyll is an awesome static site generator allowing bloggers to express themselves rapidly. In this post, I explain how it is the perfect tool I have needed to start a personal website.

Genesys

After passing my OCP Java 11 certification, I posted a message on some social networks (Twitter, Linked and Facebook) to share my joys after accomplishing that goal. I found the moment special because I had the opportunity to pass a limited version of the certification offered by Oracle for Java’s 25th anniversary. Oddly, my post was so popular (in my opinion 😉) that gives me the idea to begin a new project, create a blog.

The analysis phase

Before starting any project, it’s important to find the best proportion of those 3 parameters: the delivery time, the quality requirement, and the cost of carrying out the project. So let’s see how I try to optimize each of them for my website project.

• The delivery time

  The time I spend on the implementation is an important factor for me to deliver a personal project. Spending too much time on it can lead me to discouragement and increase my risk of abandonment. Because during the implementation, my workloads can be increased at work or I can be booked by a new client on a new project. So having a tool that allows me to minimize the time to deliver is a must.

• The quality requirement

  I am a web developer who is more experimented in implement web applications than websites. So my abilities to create a blog are limited. Some competencies are: Search engine optimization, UI/UX of the product, best practices for a blog website, articles classification (tags and categories), comment management, etc. So having a tool that allows me to deliver a blog with all that functionalities is a must too.

• The cost

  Creating a personal site has a cost, but for my part I wanted the cost to be as small as possible. Because in a way, it is an investment and the objective of all investment is profit. So have the ability to create the blog with the minimum cost possible is also a must.

Jekyll, the perfect tool

After the analysis phase, it was time to make a decision. So I did some research, I discovered some concepts that were new for me: JAMstack, static site generator, GitHub Pages, Jekyll, and more. Jekyll is the perfect tool that I need for the following reasons:

• First of all, create a static site with Jekyll can be made in a few steps. This technology has a shallow learning curve. So, I was able to do a pretty good job in a few hours. Also, there are a lot of plugins and freely available themes for a Jekyll website. To make my website operational, I just had to find a beautiful theme with all the required plugins to have a decent job. Like that, I did not have to struggle to find the best practices in the domain.
• Secondly, the deployment and the hosting of a Jekyll site are free with Github Pages. The process is as fast as creating a repository on GitHub. All I needed to do is create a repository with the name: wiljeanlouis.github.io, and tell Github Pages what branch to use as a source to do its magic tricks. Even though I add the possibility to see my site running correctly on the github.io domain, I preferred to configure a custom domain that I purchased at Namecheap (one of the best places to buy a domain name).
• The icing on the cake, GitHub Pages offers HTTPS support by using Let’s encrypt. That was amazing for me.

And Voilà, my goal was achieved, I had an up and running personal website.

Thank you for reading time, if you have any questions or suggestions about Jekyll, Github Pages, or the way I set up my website, just let me know in the comments section below.