Jekyll + GitHub page – Static Personal Blog’s one of the biggest “notorious reputation” of a static page is its “static”. What does this mean? We all know that a real website, let’s say, a personal blog website, it has to have several separate pages (for example: About, Services, Contact, as well as some details pages) at the very least. The functionality of each page may differ, but there are usually some things in common, such as the header, footer, and overall page style.
Well the native Static Personal Blog, no matter how many pages it would has, you have to “write” these duplicates on each page, or copy and paste again and again. This tedious and boring job has frustrated so many people, especially for those who pursue DRY programming principle. DRY you must know stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself. A real programmer just can’t stand the same code repeatedly and endlessly appearing on different pages – so-called Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
This reminds me of the frowsty coquettish hero in “Silicon Valley”. When he was like falling in love with another female programmer, and just because he can’t stand her using the spacebar to indent the code rather than the tab key, they ended that fair in a very funny and awkward way.
On the other hand, dynamic web pages can easily break the drawbacks of duplicate references because of the server-side back end language (such as PHP, .net, Python, or even ubiquitous Node.js, etc.). Dynamic web design can easily implement a variety of permutations and combinations, so it becomes more and more popular compared with a static personal blog.
For an organization or a personal website that is just required pictures and texts demonstration (such websites account for half of the entire Internet), if there is a way to eliminate the trouble of complex back-end languages and databases, and in the meantime, can apply the simplicity of static pages would be really great.
Therefore a program like Jekyll which can manipulate static pages came into our world. Jekyll is simply a static site generator that generates static files based on the source of the web page. It provides templates, variables, plugins, and more, so it can actually be used to write the entire site.
As a result, the server-side requirements are greatly reduced, because the back-end programs and database are redundant, this makes many organizations are very willing to provide such free server services to the public, especially the static personal blog.
The most influential and renowned player in this field is GitHub. GitHub is a company that provides git hosting services and is also the world’s largest programmers’ community. The status of this community is like the wizarding school in Harry Potter – how could you don’t know Hogwarts or Beauxbatons? Truly, almost every programmer in the world owns at least one GitHub account, and GitHub also attracts many curious non-programmers since they think GitHub is “cool”.
Moreover, GitHub’s gh-pages naturally support Jekyll and its corresponding plugins, GitHub also offers SSH support, and most importantly, it is free. God, um, when I knew this at the first, I felt exactly the same way as you.
Jekyll + GitHub page + html (or markdown) = the most static website in the new era.
Conclusion
This article is written for people who want to build a stable, cool, server-free fee website or a blog. If you want so, please contact me