Tom Preston-Werner, aka mojombo, rocks. When GitHub announced GitHub Pages recently, they pointed to a new blog engine, Jekyll. Jekyll generates the blog as a set of static pages — no database reads, no PHP, just fast HTML. I was instantly drawn to it, and since I’ve been itching to switch blog engines, I damn near moved this blog. It would be hosted on GitHub, for free. And it would be backed up using my favorite version control system. I would have complete access to all of my content. If WordPress went belly up, I would lose all of my content. That bothers me.
Jekyll is still in its infancy. But for two things, I would switch right now. First, support for tags is incomplete, so pages on my blog such as http://mendicantbug.com/category/computational-linguistics/ would no longer be supported under Jekyll. That would play hell with my Google traffic. I’m willing to make that sacrifice since most of that traffic is from people who don’t care about the main topics I’m interested in. Second, and this is the killer, Jekyll does not support comments. Yet. The good news is, it can be forked and someone may implement comments. I hope so, but the static nature of Jekyll means handling comments is not very straightforward. I can imagine how it might be done, so we’ll see. I suppose I could do it myself, but my plate is so full right now I’m having a hard time getting what I need to get done done.
So what I’m doing instead, for now, is hosting my code there. Jekyll has code highlighting built-in using Liquid. Handy! I put up the source for my post on Bandwidth simulation. I’ll be adding more soon, which I’ll make note of, if for some reason you’re actually interested.
