HTML-Tricks

In a previous post I described how one could create their own website for free, and I utilized a program called Jekyll (I will assume that you have the article, so as not to be redundant in explaining new terms). Of course, there are many options other than Jekyll, such as the popular Wordpress.org. I’m here to show you why Jekyll is the better option when deciding how to manage your site.

This is perhaps more of a CMS or no-CMS debate. A CMS is an abbreviated term for a “content management system”, which is a clickable, or dynamic, WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) software for managing blogs and websites. It can be heavy sometimes and is probably overkill for many personal sites.

Of Messes and Disasters

An amazing alternative to the mess that is CMS is Jekyll, one of the more popular static site generators out there. Unlike a CMS, which is dynamic and has a graphical user interface (WYSIWYG) for managing a website, static site generators are, well, static. This means that everything is done in basic text files with a “language” called Markdown. Markdown is not a hard language to learn (it is definitely not as hard to learn as a traditional “programming” language, such as JavaScript), and is basically like writing a document in a text editor like Microsoft’s Notepad, but instead of clicking on a button to bold or italicize a word, you would wrap 2 asterisks (*) or underlines (_) around it to bold or italicize the word, respectively. In Markdown, the word “Jekyll” with double asterisks wrapped around it (to bold the text), like **jekyll**, would appear as Jekyll. However, don’t fret if you do not want to do this, because there are workarounds (see “Prose is Better Than Poetry”).

Jekyll generates a full-blown site from just text, HTML, and CSS files, with a little bit of other good stuff, like the YAML (a recursive acronym for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”) and Liquid languages. It is obviously more efficient than the clunky disaster that is Wordpress, and you can work on your blog posts entirely online or offline if you please, as well. You can do this by editing the posts in a text editor on your computer and uploading it to website hosting platform such as GitHub Pages. Or, you could work online using Prose, “a content editor for GitHub.”

Prose is Better Than Poetry

“Prose provides a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. It’s a web-based interface for managing content on GitHub. Use it to create, edit, and delete files, and save your changes directly to GitHub. Host your website on GitHub Pages for free, or set up your own GitHub webhook server. Prose has advanced support for Jekyll sites and markdown content. Prose detects markdown posts in Jekyll sites and provides syntax highlighting, a formatting toolbar, and draft previews in the site’s full layout.” -prose.io website

If you use GitHub and GitHub Pages for your website, adding Prose to your workflow will make writing posts for your blogs easier. You could, in theory, write anywhere (on your computer or on your phone or tablet), without having to be restricted to a certain computer. It will also allow you to bold, italicize, quote, add images, add unordered (bulleted) lists, add ordered (numbered) lists, and more (rejoice, fellow human!). So you would not even need to know Markdown in order to write blog posts “with” style. However, be aware that Prose may not work well with alternatives to GitHub Pages, such as Netlify.

For the HTML-Tricks website, we use GitHub Pages to host our site, and GitHub Pages is powered by Jekyll. We have also implemented Prose into our workflow (all it takes is a simple sign in to GitHub from the prose.io site, and you’re good to go). In fact, this post was written 100% on Prose. You can even preview your post before it’s published without trouble, which is apparently a selling point for some folks.

Closing Thoughts

In a nutshell, CMS programs like Wordpress can be overkill for many small personal sites and blogs (and even big sites - the HealthCare.gov site is actually powered by Jekyll). To say that it is bulky is an understatement. As someone who has unfortunately been exposed to Wordpress and dynamic content management systems, I would like to present a different solution: static site generators like Jekyll. Although Jekyll is simple, it can be very powerful. With just a few files, you can have a site up and running in seconds. In the past, it used to be that CMS was the best and recommended way to build sites, but now there are better, easier, and more efficient methods to publishing content to the world wide web. So, what are you waiting for? In the time that it took you to read this article, you could have already created your own site! All that you need to do is visit GitHub.com, then GitHub Pages and follow the instructions to create your own page, then Jekyll and the Jekyll Docs for a step-by-step guide. Have fun, and good luck!