A new Jekyll user

Website development in the early day's was simple: just drum up some html pages configure your server, and voila a new site was born.

But then... oh then...

Gone are the days where a simple site would suffice, where a single content provider made a site. Dynamic content was key. In came php and a whole slew of 'Content Management Systems".

I used to ... wait a moment, it might still exist ... yes, it does: http://lugt.home.xs4all.nl/tnp/. Well, I wanted to say that I used to have a site that was a simple html thingy. But it seems I still have! lol.

Later in life I had a few other sites, but by then I used Wordpress. I remember that I quite liked the "Suffusion" theme. Then came the iPhone's and iPad's. And today the keyword is "Responsive Website Design" (RWD = A website that works well on any device). Well, Wordpress can do that just fine, though the first versions of suffusion did not support RWD (I think??) and anyhow the frequent updates of Wordpress keeps one quite nimble... not to mention the gazillion of plugins... case in casu, I switched to the default Wordpress Themes to reduce the work overload. The not-so-nice (IMO!!) layout was taken as 'unavoidable'.

That worked fine for a while. Keyword is "while". For reasons unknown to me up to this date, at about Xmas time I would loose the content of the WP-database for some sites. Curiously enough not all of them, just some. And it would happen twice in a row, with about two to four weeks time in between. The first year it happened I kind of shrugged it off. Things seemed to work fine after restoring the sites. Until that is last Xmas. Same thing happened. Why? I still don't know. But by this time I had quite enough of it, and I was getting tired of Wordpress anyhow. To many updates, too many plugins, too complex, too slow. I wanted to go back to the early days of simple HTML, but then of course in a modern way... after all, we now have CSS3 and HTML5.

Lo and behold, as if ordered there fell a booklet in my inbox: "Static Site Generators" by "Brian Rinaldi". (Its free)

Nice enough booklet and a quick read. So static site builders eh? Yes that was just what I was looking for, thank you Brian! Since I am developing my sites on a mac, the choice was not all that difficult, Jekyll seems to be the bully on the block, so Jekyll it is.