Tidbits on software development, technology, and other geeky stuff

Saying Goodbye to Jekyll

I am saying goodbye to Jekyll after using it for 4 years to build my blog here at geekytidbits.com. I am transitioning to a static site generator I wrote called xertz and deployment handled by Netlify.

When I first started blogging back in December of 2010 I used WordPress. It worked great and I had a lot of fun customizing and setting everything up. This was the first time I had worked with WordPress in earnest and I grew to respect it as a CMS platform. Unwieldy at times yes, but powerful and simple to use.

After awhile I started wanting to tinker with things (of course!) and have more control over how my site was built and served. This lead me to transition to Jekyll in 2015. I was working with Ruby pretty heavily at the time, Jekyll had a vibrant (and growing) community, and it was refreshing to have a site statically built and easily hostable as opposed to using a full LAMP stack with WordPress. I had a lot of fun customizing settings and getting everything to my liking.

A few months ago I got the itch to look around for another static site generator because in the last few years some interesting projects have been gaining steam like GatsbyJS and Hugo, and Hexo. I played around with a few and took note of similarities and differances from Jekyll. One thing was sure: Jekyll seemed slow and a bit dated compared to some of these newer projects.

Ultimately, I decided to build my own because I thought it would be fun to build, maintain and tweak it. Also, the static site generators I tried were impressive but were either too feature rich for me or didn’t quite suite my preferences. No surprise there.

I plan to write more about xertz but in the meantime I need to finish up some polish, docs, and tests.

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