It seems like everyone wants you to have a website. And I get it. The topics someone chooses to write about give you sense of where their interests lie (or in my case, where my curiosity leads me)1, and reading someone’s writing can give you a window into how they think.

So here we are. I needed a site to be able to represent what I’ve been exploring, but didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on the actual website itself. Enter Jekyll.

The cool thing about Jekyll is that once everything is installed, you just run a few commands and you’ve got a website. To update it just add or edit a Markdown file, render, and push it up to wherever you have your static assets stored. No pipeline needed.

Installation

So local installations turned out to be the bulk of the work. This is because Jekyll requires Ruby, and there were a few hiccups around Ruby.

I am not a regular Ruby user, and so I had an older, default version of Ruby that had been on my machine for a while. The Jekyll documentation requires any version higher than Ruby 2.7, and the current version is 3.4. Fix that we must.

  • First tried to do a brew install but my OS wasn’t seeing this new version, even after adding the Cellar location to my PATH.
  • Then I decided I should really be using a version manager, and by default my mind went to RVM. But after installing RVM, I decided it was causing more issues that it was resolving. So I read the documentation more closely (ding! ding! ding! ding!) and found out they recommend chruby. So I uninstalled RVM and just went with the recommendation.

I then discovered the thing that made my day. The way to uninstall RVM and all its related files is the very impressive command:

 rvm implode

Definitely high up there in the commands I’ve ever typed into a CLI!

Once chruby was installed and sourced it in my shell’s profile everything worked like butter.

Make a Website

The Jekyll quickstart explains you can get a locally running website with four commands:

Alt

Yup! That’s it! You’ve got a site.

Next Steps

There are a few basic things you need to grok to customize your site. Among them:

  • How to Add an Image
  • How to Change the Theme from the default Minima theme
  • How to Customize a Page

But basically, this is all I needed to get off and running.

The only thing left was to deploy, and there are a few options for easy deployment:

  • Github pages and Finsta are they easiest, and recommended on the Jekyll site
  • AWS, Google Cloud, and other cloud providers have domain hosting and very low cost (and sometimes free) options for static sites.

Conclusion

I have created sites from scratch (early days…remember poring over CSS to move something a few pixels?), then Dreamweaver 🙄, eventually moving on to Express and Flask (and yes, Rails). But this was by far the quickest, least painful experience I’ve ever had getting getting a homegrown website put together. It’s basically markdown and a directory structure. But perfect for my needs. Sometimes simple is better.

Footnotes

  1. Because before I made myself ruthlessly prioritize I was monkeying with Tableau. Then went down a rabbit hole reviewing all the interesting data out there that could be visualized! ↩