Starting a Jekyll blog

I’ve begun experimenting with a statically generated site in place of my Wordpress instance: The more I work with technology, the more I find myself enjoying the uncomplicated. And also it’s a low-stakes environment in which to shake things up a bit and try something different.

In this specific case I’ve pretty much removed all moving parts from presenting content to visitors to my web site. No content has to be fetched from a database. Everything the web server has to work with, is the actual file that will be rendered by the visitor’s browser.

First of all, this makes the server load negligible. Second, it makes me able to claim that unless I’ve explicitly added scripts or external references to a page, nothing like that ever runs here, which in turn means that the pages are nice and fast to render on the visitor’s device and don’t needlessly consume power or generate unexpected data traffic.

Technology

I use Jekyll, a Ruby based system that allows you to write your content in Markdown. It then converts the Markdown text together with a chosen theme into HTML files in a structure suitable for being picked up and presented by pretty much any web server.

For reference, the previous paragraph looks like this in Markdown:

## Technology
I use [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com), a [Ruby](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) based system that allows you to write your content in [Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/). It then converts the Markdown text together with a chosen theme into HTML files in a structure suitable for being picked up and presented by pretty much any web server.

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Edited on 2023-09-09: I’ve added a post describing how I’ve solved content version control and automated deployment with the help of Gitea and git hooks.