Moving my blog to GitHub or why Jekyll is awesome

Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about why I stopped blogging and that I should do it again one of these days. I have had many ideas since then, however, for a number of reasons, I have been pushing that decision forward.

Hopefully, that day has arrived.

I think one of the reasons (and perhaps the most important one) that made me stop blogging was that most blogging frameworks are just either too complicated or poluted. One usually have to go through a number of pages full of menus, dropdown selections, plugins, etc in order to write a blog post. When one finally arrives to the right page (not before having to look for the magic “new post” button hidden somewhere in the complicated UI), one realises that the window occupies a third of the screen with the other two thirds being used for totally useless components. They are nothing but distractions from the actual purpose, which is to write a blog post.

This is just wrong. When I want to write, I want to concentrate in the actual post. I don’t want to see menu bars, fancy buttons, gorgeous styles, etc. I want to write. That’s it. Everything else comes later. Everything else is a distraction.

That’s why I think Jekyll is a good alternative. Jekyll simplifies the blogging experience because I can:

• Choose what editor to use. In my case, I use MacVim. I am comfortable with it and it’s simple.
• Use Markdown. I don’t have to worry about styling. I don’t have to click buttons to add links, lists or write html. I am used to write markdown pages (READMEs and Wikis) and therefore I don’t even have to think about it’s syntax.
• Use GitHub. Being able to push blog posts to the repository is just a wonderful experience.
• Run Jekyll locally to test changes. After I’m done with the blog post, I can see a preview by running jekyll --server on my local machine.
• Change the theme with one command. Jekyll provides an easy way of changing themes, adding blog posts, pages, etc.

Thus, I really hope that this change will make me a more active blogger!