I Like Jekyll

It takes me an inordinate amount of time to write stuff. It doesn’t help when I have to spend time wrestling with the blogging platform. I’ve tried too many platforms for a sporadic blogger; while they were all easy to use, feature-rich and beautiful, each one wasn’t quite right for me.

It boiled down to too many bells and whistles. I’m no product manager but I know how hard it is to make things simple and flexible at the same time. I was dizzyed by all the customizations options I would never use and was convinced these features bogged down the process of doing simple things. Everything felt sluggish.

I tried Medium too – a dreamy writing experience that made my first-world problems with blogging platforms all the more obvious. (This was pre- Medium 1.0 which I hear is a whole other kettle of fish.) I’ve stopped using Medium, not because of any beef with its spartan feature set (which was good enough for me!), because it felt like some one else’s space. I got no beef with that either. I just want my own space.

Then Jonathan told me to check out Jekyll. I poked around the docs, then I started hunting for themes to install, upon which it became abundantly clear how easy it was to implement. So I did. The one thing that was a pain in the ass was migrating my old blogs over, and that’s only because there wasn’t an importer for the platform I used (Jekyll has importers for Tumblr, Drupal, Wordpress, and more).

What I like best is that while I now have more customization options than ever at my fingertips, when I want to change something (rarely) it’s much easier to get exactly what I want, and when I don’t, it doesn’t get in the way. Everything is simpler, faster and better.

So here we are. New blog!