For some time, I was looking out for a simplistic blogging platform. After spending time with Wordpress, I thought I wasn’t doing much justice to it. My personal site contains just HTML posts, so writing them in plain markdown would be preferable compared to heavy WYSIWYG platforms. I don’t need to take care about the back-end much and get complete control over the front-end.

That’s where Jekyll comes in giving you complete control over the generation of HTML content. Previously, I’d been under the limitations of a shared hosting provider. Moving my hosting to a dedicated VPS was painless and something I’d wanted to do for a long long time.

It look me some time to figure out the Jekyll mechanism. Once done, writing posts is almost effortless. One copy of my repo is on Github with another copy generating the HTML content kept in my VM on every commit I push. There are many blogs which would eventually be helpful in writing a fully-fledged Jekyll website.

I’ve set up a post-receive hook in my VPS that updates the site on every git commit.

#!/bin/bash -l
GIT_REPO=$HOME/repos/myblog.git
TMP_GIT_CLONE=$HOME/tmp/git/myblog
PUBLIC_WWW=/var/www/myblog

git clone $GIT_REPO $TMP_GIT_CLONE
jekyll build --source $TMP_GIT_CLONE --destination $PUBLIC_WWW
rm -Rf $TMP_GIT_CLONE
exit

This intagram-jekyll script helped me setting up my instagram feed.

You could also refer to the Liquid cheatsheet provided by Shopify.