Playing with Jekyll

[adevyish]

Originally I was planning on hand-coding my entire fic website, but after one (1) fic I realized I need a templating language. I’ve wanted to try Jekyll for years, so that’s what I’m working with right now. I like the flexibility of not having to stick to a strict blogging system while still having access to some of the features of one.

Pros:

• No DB required
• Easy to understand templating if you’re coming from other templating languages
• Can do snippet inclusion instead of doing strict templating
• Can have as many templates as you want
• Can make either pages (undated) or posts (dated), and these can be HTML or Markdown. I write my fic in Markdown so I like having this!
• RSS feed comes for free with posts
• Alternately, you can organize fics by folder if you’re making pages in collections

Cons:

• Documentation okay but could be better
• Multi-chaptered fic have to be done via collections or tags
• You must define each collection in your config file D:
• Pagination requires a plugin
• No CMS, the management is your file system
• Manual image management

Also, I have a few fics that have custom CSS but I haven’t figured out how I’m going to include custom CSS files yet. Worst case scenario I can put them in my site’s main SCSS file, since SCSS lets me nest classes easily.

Anyway this is probably going to take me several more weekends but it’s nice to play with something new.