Ruby Free Jekyll With GitHub Pages
If you've actually looked into using jekyll for a website, I know what you might be thinking... So... wait. Jekyll is powered by Ruby right? What could you possibly mean by a Ruby free jekyll? How would something like that even be viable, and why would you even want that?
Ok ok, you've got me there. I want to go over a few reason why I've chosen to start using jekyll, and what I mean by Ruby free.
Spoiler - it's not actually Ruby free, but it feels that way, and I like it :D
This blog post is a precursor to a series of posts that I'll be writing to share my experience with Jekyll coming at it for the first time, ever. If you are interested in learning Jekyll from someone who is also jumping in for the first time I'll be glad to have you along this journey with me.
Now, lets go over the goals I have for this series.
My use for Jekyll
Over the course of my development career I've learned to solve unique problems, build web pages, write performant SQL, design databases, migrate data from servers to the cloud, review code, write documents, manage build processes, and more...
But there is one major problem I'm sitting face to face with. I need a place where I can re-invest what I've learned back into the amazing development community. It is time to build a home where I can share my development experiences with you, so jekyll, the lucky dog, will be my first go-to attempt at writing and maintaining a blog.
Simple Goals
Simple... I want to focus on two very specific things
- Generating blog content
- Front end website design
I don't want to worry about setting up a server or complicated dev environment for this project. This is where the Ruby free part comes in. GitHub Pages by default can take care of the Ruby-business for you, and you don't have to install any dev environment if you use what is baked in for you. However, if you want to test the site locally to see changes before pushing it up, you can still do that (and is probably preferred for many especially if you have a following already). But, for now, I'm not going to bother even installing Ruby on my system to see how it goes.
Jekyll in a nut-shell
Jekyll is a tool that can turn various files into a static website, and it has a few features that made me consider it
- It has baked in functionality for blogging
- You can choose a theme
- You can choose to customize layouts and styles, if you want (I will)
Coming Next Week - How To get it running and themed
It was surprisingly difficult to find the right information about how to correctly get the site themed. I followed the basic steps to get rolling, but my themes were not applying like I thought they were supposed to... I hope to clarify some of the confusion that I had for anyone else trying to get it going. I saw many other posts of people having theme problems like I did.