After unsuccessful attempts at blogging relying on 3rd party platforms like Posterous, Tumblr, Droplr and whatnot here is my new stab at delivering ideas to the world. Fully autonomous this time. Surprisingly there are not that many options available for blogging…

Why not Wordpress? I never really liked it, between these options and plugins there seem to be little left to the actual content creation. This weekend I have decided to finally get back to blogging.

Having two kids and being a freelancer I don’t have much time to fight technology. I don’t want to mess with bloated Wordpress themes, plugins and exploits. Making my own blog on Ruby on Rails sounds tempting but I better concentrate on other things in life.

Forcing markdown on users in projects lately I wanted to write in markdown. And the options that came to mind were Jekyll which I wanted to try for a long time and Middleman. Jekyll had less options and less of everything so it sounded like a nice fit for a weekend project. And here it is.

Partials in Jekyll

One of the tricky part was rendering of posts. In rails I would throw in a partial. Since there are no partials in Jekyll I had to use includes.

This is what I have in my posts and index pages:

{% for post in site.posts %}
  {% include _post.html post=post %}
{% endfor %}

And the actual _post.html include uses include.post variable:

<h2>
    <a href="{{ include.post.url }}">{{ include.post.title }}</a>
</h2>
<p>{{ include.post.excerpt }}<p>

This is something I would do in Rails. Everything seems pretty sweet so far. The only issue is that I have to write HTML again which seems as a step back after Slim.

Hosting the new static site at firedev.github.io, courtesy of Github. Finally I can sleep at nights knowing that whatever crazy idea the companies I’ve trusted my content to are going to get it won’t affect me.