Blogging is too much work, so why have I decided to even try it again? It takes a long time to get a website up and running and get the layout just right and by the time I have finished I don’t ever want to touch it again. I don’t have much luck with ever updating a website again once I have it the way I like it. In the past I have had blog sections to my web pages, it always required having to go and boot up my feature-bloated IDE or WYSIWYG editor, and honestly, after a post or two it was over.

What if I could just write a program…

I often times would dream of writing a program that would take little bits of my text and spin up full web pages. I would dream of being able to update the blog from anywhere without even needing a proper text editor. I don’t particularly want to join sites that allow this because then I give up my style, and honestly a whole lot more if you have been paying attention to the real costs of social media. I don’t want people to have ads shoved down their throat just to see what I am up to.

However, before I undertook the task of finally writing something, I wanted to see what was out there. No sense rewriting the wheel. I heard about GitHub pages and thought it might be worth trying out. I am used to being able to push code from any computer, and I know they also have online editors, so I figured I would check it out. That is when I got introduced to Jekyll.

What it does for me

With Jekyll I can create short little markdown files that then get pushed to my GitHub repository. From there the magic happens. Jekyll builds and deploys my site within my repository and GitHub Pages picks up the changes. The new blog post is instantly available on the web. It took me less time to set up and configure Jekyll and GitHub Pages than it previously would have taken me to publish a single blog post. I’m sold!