experiment: jekyll static website engine
this is a technical note that will not interest most folks
When I moved virtual servers a few months ago I opted not to move over my existing domain and personal websites. Most of what I was writing was on the blog anyhow.
I got involved in a backchannel conversation about static websites (sites with content precompiled from sources rather than dynamically generated on-the-fly). In the past I’d used orb, a preprocessor that worked well for my needs. When I started looking again I wanted something
- that could easily host webpages and blogposts on the same site
- required minimal bandwidth (wordpress editing kills me)
- was responsive (again, wordpress kills me)
- was configurable (wordpress….. you get the picture)
- jekyll - used by github pages, etc
- hexo - leverages node.js, which has given me fits on Debian before
- hugo - looks promising
For the first go-‘round I am playing with jekyll and the minimal mistakes theme. The learning curve is steeper than I expected but I am figuring it out.
I also need to get on the ball and set up TLS certs for the rvwiki and other sites I host. Last time I did that was ~1995 (!) on a Netscape webserver (!!). Haven’t cared much about it and I’m not an “HTTPS everywhere” person for non-sensitive sites as it jams a spike in compression proxies.