Published: Jan 18, 2024
Hi, this blog is generated with Jekyll, using the Bulma Clean Theme. I wanted a simple page to generate static content, about things I develop. I had some development blog things on my admin panel for my gameservers, but it was always felt out of place. So I looked around for some blogging tools.
I did not want to use any external services, such as Ghost or Substack. I did not also want to make my own blog software, as that would just make it more annoying to just write what’s on my mind.
I decided on static site generators. I could have done a site with Vue.js, or something else, but what’s the point? It’s simple static text. I first tried to use Hugo (gohugo.io), but the premade themes came with many bugs that made it impossible to get setup easily. I remembered trying out Grav CMS (getgrav.org) a long time ago, but it’s running on PHP, and just felt too janky for what I want, ran like a dedicated service. Next I tried to use Eleventy (11ty.dev), which might have worked fine, but I didn’t see many themes, and I didn’t want to have to run any tool to deploy (although I now have an entire ruby dev kit installed…)
So I decided to go with Jekyll, install the dev kit and see if it worked. It did, and the first theme looked quite fine too which was promising. I of course then immediately went to modify it, and because the theme is just built in, I overwrote it with the post layout and all that fun stuff, I just decided to use my favorite CSS framework: Bulma (bulma.io), thanks to Bulma Clean Theme. I modified it slightly to fit my needs, which is quite easy with Jekyll’s system.
Overall, I’m very happy with Jekyll and how I have this blog setup. It would be nicer if it didn’t need Ruby, and that the commands don’t spew errors when you forget an argument or something minor happened. (jekyll-compose returns a full stacktrace if you do not include a name, which is not intuitive. “You must specify a name”, what as an argument?, you never gave the syntax!). It would also be nice if jekyll commands worked with Git Bash for Windows, it’s not a big deal, just have to enter cmd, but still…