Switching back to static markup may at first seem like a reversion to the late 1990s. Yet Jekyll is a simple and elegant system that mimics the characteristics of a dynamic site — drawing content from a database and inserting it into templates via a cms — without all that complexity. As a firm believer in the kiss principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), I always try to find the right tool for the job, and Jekyll is a simple solution to a common problem: “I want my own customised blog.” Jekyll is also flexible enough that it can easily be used for other tasks. For example, GitHub uses it to drive GitHub Pages.

This article describes using Jekyll to build a web site: from downloading it, setting up a development environment, and hacking up template files. I conclude with a word on maintaining updates between your development instance (for example adding new blog entries) and synchronising them to your web server. Note that I wrote this piece from a designer’s perspective.

The system I’m using to generate the blog is called Octopress by Brandon Mathis, which is a framework around Jekyll. You can run it wherever you like (locally, or even on your server), and it will generate an entirely static web site for you, and even rsync it to where you’re hosting from.