I published my first website sometime circa 2000. Of course I’d been obsessed with my computer before ever getting dial-up, so I was amazed to see what a few lines of html would output on the screen. I would write very basic code on notepad and push it out to my very own journal as so many did back then.

I’ve been nostalgic of that time, which I feel has been completely buried under social media and glossy themed sites all seemingly built for honing personal brands or monetizing carefully curated blogs. Back then it was about the content, whatever it was. Justin Jackson better explains this nostalgia I’m talking about.

So here we are! Wordpress is a great tool for large-scale web projects that require a CMS, but not so efficient when all you want to do is write and put up a few pictures (my case).

Static Websites with Jekyll

Static websites are the way forward and Jekyll is a great option for that; light-weight, quick, safe. Words and simple code, like the old days. Why I love it:

• no need for a fancy CMS or backend
• free hosting on GitHub Pages AND complete control over your site
• local file storage for easy maintenance through terminal/GitHub Desktop
• posts can be written in markdown to keep them as plain text files

Also, Jekyll uses Liquid for templating, which relieves the pains of php.

I’m happy with this change, and I hope to stick with it - I’ve built and deleted more sites than I can remember :nerd:.