Jekyll

Saturday, February 4, 2017 8:00 am Daniel J. Summers

If you're still perusing this site every so often, you've likely noticed that there hasn't been a whole lot of any new stuff for over a year. Some of that was technical, but much of it has simply been life. Of course, in the time, I would need to make sure the server stayed up, and that the software behind it stays updated, to keep up with security and such.

As I was working on another project, I had some experience with Jekyll, a package that generates plain old HTML files. This means that there doesn't need to be any special server software or database backing the site; once it is generated, the files are just served statically. As there is no dynamic aspect, there are no lurking security holes or constant updates. There also, as of now, are no comments, either those from the old pages, or new ones that can be entered. There are different techniques for that, but with the advent of social media interactions, blog comments may not be worth the spam-fighting efforts it takes to support them, or the time it takes to moderate them.

The site is now being generated using Jekyll. I won't say that it will help me be able to post more; while I have some ideas of things I'd like to write, static HTML files don't add hours to my day. :) But, the site generates on my development machine in about 30 seconds, and the job that checks for updates runs every 5 minutes, so we'll see. It even produces an RSS feed, so you'll still get updates that way.