Publishing thoughts using Jekyll

Jekyll has been my static website generator for years now. I understand every little detail of its inner workings and I can create my own themes and plug-ins if needed. Jekyll allows for an incredible amount of control, something I would have to give up had I used WordPress or some other CMS. Jekyll also allows me to create websites that perform very well, and I always strive for a score of 100 on Lighthouse.

Over the years I’ve made quite some changes to my website though. I mostly want the least amount of friction between my thoughts and publishing them on the internet. That’s what I created a bunch of scripts to help with just that.

Generating the website

I use a workflow with Docker and Make to preview this website on my laptop. I don’t want the hassle of installing and maintaining Jekyll on my local machine, so Docker seems like the only logical solution.

Everything’s wrapped in a Makefile so I don’t have to remember the commands, I just run make serve to fire up the built-in webserver.

.PHONY: clean post build serve 

clean:
	$(RM) -r _site/

post:
	docker run -p 4000:4000 --rm --volume="$(CURDIR):/srv/jekyll" -it jekyll/minimal rake post

build: clean
	docker run -p 4000:4000 --rm --volume="$(CURDIR):/srv/jekyll" -it jekyll/minimal jekyll b

serve: clean
	docker run -p 4000:4000 --rm --volume="$(CURDIR):/srv/jekyll" -it jekyll/minimal jekyll s --drafts

Creating a new post

As you can see the Makefile also includes a command to generate a new post. This command uses a tool called Rake, which is a Make-like tool for Ruby, it’s included in the Docker image as well.

A new post ends up in the _drafts folder where I can freely write without it ending up on the website before I want to actually publish it. When I eventually do want to publish, I just move the Markdown file from _drafts into _posts.

Like everything else about this website, the Rakefile to achieve this is also available on GitHub.

Make sure you include show_drafts: false in your configuration so drafts won’t end up on the website anyway.

GitHub Pages

Hosting a completely static website doesn’t require some complex stack of software - that’s why I’ve been hosting on GitHub Pages for quite a while now. Like any other service, GitHub Pages can and will go offline sometimes, but it’s free so I have absolutely nothing to complain about.

GitHub Pages even comes with a free SSL certificate for you domain and you can set up a custom 404 error page.