I had this site a little bit abandoned, so I decided to rewrite it one more time. This time I opted for a simpler design but the biggest change is that I decided to abandon Django and create a static site.

Static sites can be hosted it on github pages, so I can save some MBs in the hosting. It’s easy to publish new content, just make a commit to the forge. Moreover, this site doesn’t need 90% of the functionality offered by Django, I was using a sledgehammer to crack nuts.

But of course I didn’t create the HTML files from scratch, I use Jekyll.

Jekyll?

Jekyll is a static site generator developed in Ruby. It has support for markdown and integration with github pages. With the help of Jekyll bootstrap I was able to create the new version in a couple of hours.

Jekyll is really simple, just run jekyll --serve in your project folder and it will parse the markdown and create the site. The generated site will be in the _site folder. Serve this folder with your static HTTP server (Nginx, Apache…) and enjoy.

Hyde is a similar project in Python, and it was my first option. I installed the new version but the documentation is really poor(at the time of writing). I decided to install the old version but I found this bug. I realize I was spending too much time for such a simple task. Time to abandon Hyde and embrace Jekyll.

Design

I’m not a designer but fortunately I had Twitter bootstrap and Google fonts to help me to create a readable design. I want to create long articles, so readability it’s an important point. I tried many fonts until one day I discovered Steve Losh site, I shamelessly copied his font selection.

Show me the code

The code is available on Github, feel free to check it and make suggestions.

• My website prelaunch checklist →