Jekyll 1.0 Released

Jekyll 1.0 Released(blog.parkermoore.de)

160 points by parkr 13 years ago | 74 comments

SnowLprd 13 years ago |

Glad to see Jekyll development resume -- bravo! For those who prefer Python over Ruby, be sure to check out Pelican, version 3.2 of which was recently released. Bountiful themes, plugins, and a very active community: http://getpelican.com/

cabbeer 13 years ago | |

How is it functionally different from jekyll?

arocks 13 years ago | | |

I recently moved my blog from Jekyll to Pelican and wrote about it [1].

Functionally some of the differences I found are:

* Jekyll output directory structure has a one-to-one correspondence with its input. While Pelican tries to standardize it for you e.g. static files go to one folder.

* Pelican has built in support for theming. Jekyll makes no such distinction between your theme and content.

* Pelican has a much more modular architecture since it can supports multiple inputs like reStructuredText/Markdown and multiple outputs like PDF

Anecdotally, I found Jekyll to be a bit slower than Python for building my blog.

[1]: http://arunrocks.com/moving-blogs-to-pelican/

SnowLprd 13 years ago | | |

I don't have enough experience with Jekyll to answer that question, but I haven't found Pelican to be missing anything I've wanted to do so far. (^_^)

kibibu 13 years ago |

It would be lovely if, on these announcement posts, there was a one-sentence blurb that said what the product actually is.

username111 13 years ago | |

Well if you're on hacker news and you don't know what jekyll is you're probably in the minority.

cschmidt 13 years ago | | |

I imagine most HN people do know that Jekyll is a static blog generator written in Ruby, which is used by Github pages. However, he has a point that I often up on open source release announcements, and I don't know what the project is about, and there isn't an obvious link to the that information.

kibibu 13 years ago | | |

I do know what it is; I also know what Jenkins, Jakarta, Jellyfish and Jasper are.

There is literally nothing in the text of the linked page to provide enough context for those of us who are familiar with projects but bad with names to decipher which one of the thousands of projects we've seen announced or discussed it is about.

Jekyll is one of hundreds of projects that popped up in the Great Static Site Generator Rush of 2012, so I think asking for a blurb is reasonable.

hayksaakian 13 years ago | | |

He's pointing out a legitimate problem.

jazzychad 13 years ago |

I love using Jekyll to generate my blog, and I host it in an S3 bucket making it extremely cheap and easy to serve.

Lately I've been wanting to revive all of my old digital photos and put them online. I'm considering using Jekyll to make an online gallery of photo albums hosted on S3 as well. This might turn into my next side-project. Has someone done something like this before?

ggreer 13 years ago | |

I made https://github.com/ggreer/jekyll-gallery-generator because I couldn't find anything. It's rough around the edges but good enough for my usage. With some tweaks to the templates and CSS, it can look nice: http://geoff.greer.fm/photos/

parkr 13 years ago | |

Nothing exactly like what you're describing, but this might help you get started: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/pull/585

_b8r0 13 years ago |

Jekyll's all well and good but after a lot of deliberation I settled on Nanoc[1]. Most of the static generators seem much of a muchness, at one point I was almost ready to roll my own in python with Jinja2.

[1] - http://nanoc.ws/

yogsototh 13 years ago | |

Also, I can't resist but to mention hakyll[1]. I switched from nanoc to hakyll[2]. The two of them are great to use.

[1] - http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

[2] - http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Hakyll-setup/

XBigTK13X 13 years ago | |

I also found that these generators are heavier than what my small blog needed.

A few months back I tried migrating from WordPress to Jekyll. A week or two after that I tried moving from Jekyll to OctoPress. I wasn't happy with either solution, so I wound up rolling my own in Python.

In three hours of work on a spare weekend, I had everything converted to my own static generator. It compiles and deploys new posts in under two seconds. It does takes longer if you make style changes, because it will then recompile Bootstrap.

If you are interested in writing your own, then check out the markdown module for Python (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Markdown). Everything else was standard Python to generate the blog, and Bash scripts to deploy it.

avolcano 13 years ago |

Awesome!

Any idea when GitHub Pages will start using 1.0 (or are they using it already?). Really want to start using that gist tag ASAP (copy-pasting the <script> embeds is a bit of a pain).

parkr 13 years ago | |

Hey avolcano! Tom is going to try to push it out soon, but I can't say whether it'll be this week or maybe the end of the month!

vanni 13 years ago | | |

It seems that Tom pushed it out! :)

gem 'jekyll', '=1.0.0'

https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages

andrewmunsell 13 years ago |

This is great news :) I generate my own personal site with Jekyll, but I'll also have to update my tutorial (http://learn.andrewmunsell.com/learn/jekyll-by-example) with some of the new stuff... The scaffolding command will definitely be great to get new users started.

The new site looks much better, too! There's definitely a lot more, useful documentation.

QuantumGuy 13 years ago | |

Remove the pay wall so I can see the guide

andrewmunsell 13 years ago | | |

You can read the entire main tutorial for free (https://learn.andrewmunsell.com/learn/jekyll-by-example/tuto...). I have some additional stuff on there for those that want it, but the actual Jekyll tutorial is there.

tbrooks 13 years ago |

I'm a huge fan of Jekyll. Two things I'd love to see pop out from the community:

1) Online Editor. I know there is Prose.io, but it requires me to host on GH pages. I like hosting on S3. parkr, I'm guessing Cornell is using some sort of backend to edit posts/pages?

2) An iPhone app that allows me to upload photos or write posts.

adelevie 13 years ago | |

Prose.io does not require GH pages. You can use post-commit hooks to clone, build, and deploy your site to S3 (or anything else). I've got a quick example of it here: https://github.com/adelevie/iron-publish

seanponeil 13 years ago | |

Prose.io looks promising, but it's stuck on the loading screen for me

cseelus 13 years ago |

Strangely Middleman wasn't mentioned here as a alternative yet, so I'll do it: http://middlemanapp.com/

With its 'blog'-gem nex Jekyll features like excerpts and support for timezone-config have been implemented for a while.

johnbellone 13 years ago | |

I have much preferred Middleman now for about six months. To be honest there would need to be a significant difference to convince me to move.

silasb 13 years ago | |

I'm a huge Middleman fan. Made a couple static sites using it.

peddamat 13 years ago |

As someone currently, as in, right at this moment, converting their blog to Jekyll/Octopress. Is there any reason not to simply use Octopress?

From my research over the past couple of weeks, it seems like Octopress is basically Jekyll with a bunch of plugins and niceties.

philipwalton 13 years ago | |

I started out using Octopress but in the end chose to go just plain Jekyll and borrow from Octopress only the things I needed. I'm pretty happy with my decision.

Ultimately, you just need to look at the feature-set of Octopress and decide if you actually want those things (custom theme, Disqus and GA integration, etc). If you do, great, if not, it's probably going to get in the way more than help.

peddamat 13 years ago | | |

Do you mind if I ask which parts of Octopress you found most useful?

josegonzalez 13 years ago | |

I ended up creating my own distribution of Jekyll which diverges significantly from Octopress. While it doesn't have anywhere near the following that Octopress does, it suits my uses more than fine.

https://github.com/josegonzalez/cimino

gyardley 13 years ago | |

As long as you spend a bunch of time customizing the theme, no.

Default-theme Octopress users all automatically get lumped under 'some dude using default Octopress' category in my brain - it's as close as you can get to publishing completely anonymously.

skinnymuch 13 years ago | | |

To be fair, the number of people who are over exposed to the point of a visceral feeling toward default Octopress has to be pretty small. But not putting you down or anything. Indeed, i can understand you feeling that way.

QuantumGuy 13 years ago |

How will this affect octopress?

parkr 13 years ago | |

Octopress will be updated to use Jekyll 1.0.

MrBra 13 years ago |

How do you guys generally setup commenting feature with Jekyll? Do you use an external commenting service or is Jekyll able to handle it alone? (maybe through plugins?)

I know Jekyll is in the domine of static website generators, but it also says it's "blog aware" so...

swanson 13 years ago | |

1) Use Disqus/LiveFyre

2) Using GitHub issues (or some other role-your-own system): http://ivanzuzak.info/2011/02/18/github-hosted-comments-for-...

3) Go without comments - your blog is YOUR space on the web, if others want to respond, let them do it in their own space

tipiirai 13 years ago | | |

4) Use https://moot.it

bstar77 13 years ago | |

I built a restful comment json service in rails as well as some light javascript in Jekyll that handles the display and jsonp requests. Whole thing took me a day and is far better than being dependent on disqus.

I didn't add any authentication or spam blocking, but that wasn't in scope for my needs.

tommytxtruong 13 years ago | | |

sound interesting! I don't like being dependent on disqus, too. Can you show how, please?

why-el 13 years ago |

I'm following the master branch and have been using some of the new features in some of my sites. There has been a lot of work to try and modularize Jekyll. Great job Parker, Tom, et al. Hopefully I will find some time to contribue.

crabasa 13 years ago |

In all of the Jekyll vs. X comments below, I think an important selling point of Jekyll is being missed:

It is built-in to Github Pages

This saves you the trouble of re-generating the site on your local machine and pushing it to a host.

crucialfelix 13 years ago | |

also for organization projects we can allow anybody on the team to edit and post directly from github's web interface.

crabasa 13 years ago | | |

That's a great point. For collaborative blogs, using Jekyll/GH spares you from having to sync permissions between your source control and your web host. That's big part of why we used Jekyll for SeattleHacks[1].

[1]: http://SeattleHacks.com

derengel 13 years ago |

As a newbie just learning ruby/html, can someone explain to me how would Jekyll help me build a small static website for a small company? how does it differ from bootstrap?

stephenhuey 13 years ago | |

A lot of blogs (most blogs?) are database-driven websites whose content is stored in a database. A server serving static webpages will enjoy better performance and static webpages are simpler to manage in many ways. However, some of the benefits a CMS gives you like auto-generating headers and navigational aids, etc, are missing if you just write some straight HTML yourself. So a static content generator can read your blueprint for the website layout and generate the webpages for you, and they don't have to be pieced together on every request they way they are with a CMS like Wordpress. Anytime you have new content to add, you can just add it to your files that you feed into the static content generator and it builds all the webpages of your entire website for you once again. I'll reiterate that the server doesn't have to waste any time processing the files to send them down to your browser--essentially, they're already complete and ready to serve down to you.

Bootstrap is basically a CSS framework. Your generated static files have normal HTML in them, and they could be using Bootstrap for the styles just like any other webpage.

derengel 13 years ago | | |

Thank you.

theIV 13 years ago |

Great job!

I haven't used Jekyll in quite some time, but just reading about an update makes me want to take another look.

Side note: the link to the Cornell website is missing the "u" at the end.

parkr 13 years ago | |

Please do! And let us know if you have any questions. We're reachable on Twitter and we have an IRC channel I hang out in.

Fixed the link, good catch. Thanks!

_nato_ 13 years ago |

I as well love jekyll. I wonder if it can stay in step with the hopes of the node Ghost project?

neogodless 13 years ago |

I can only assume that Jekyll is only targeted at people who already know what it is/does, because I read everything visible on that page before the break, and have no idea what it is. Oh wait, there are hints about it being about "blogging" and "posts" and "tags" in the feature list.

kmfrk 13 years ago |

What do you guys do for pushing blog updates to Twitter? An RSS crawler?

geoffroy 13 years ago |

The new website looks slick !!

WickyNilliams 13 years ago | |

And to top it off with meta-deliciousness, the website is Jekyll-based so you can see browse the source!

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/tree/gh-pages