Why did I set up a Jekyll blog?

I rarely blog, and often lose track of the blogging engines I’ve set up, and lose my -already rare- blog posts into the void. Therefore, I decided to set up a Jekyll blog, inspired by Tom Preston-Werner.

Instead of forking his repository and just editing, I tried to do this from scratch. After a few failed attemps, it was trivial to set the development environment up and start fiddling with the templates.

There’s already a wonderful tutorial on this, but for this post’s sake, here’s what I did so far:

• Install Ruby
• Install bundler (via running gem install bundler)
• Create a Gemfile and declare jekyll as a dependency
• Install jekyll (via running bundler install)
• Run bundle exec jekyll serve

At this point, jekyll was already watching my directory structure and files, and automatically rebuilding my site, so all I had to do is make changes, and test them in my browser at http://localhost:4000.

Next step will be integrating a comments facility, probably at some point in the following decade!