What is Jekyll, and where have I been?

It has been a while since the last time this blog was updated, and I thought it was time that changed. The plan is to make sure to regularly update the site so that it doesn’t become completely stale, but its obvious the best of intentions don’t work unless they do, so here’s to something.

I’m sure if you have seen the site before, you will notice that the design has changed to look a bit different than it was in the past. That really just has to do with the platform of the site, which historically has been a Ghost powered blog. However, after using Jekyll for a few other projects, writing posts in Markdown with a static site generator has become quite attractive to me, and as a result, this blog is now using Jekyll for the management of the posts. One of the nice side effects of using Jekyll for the site is that you are able to take advantage of Github Pages for free hosting of your site. From what I have seen, the performance of sites using their infrastructure works wonderfully and always seems to be quick.

Unfortunately, one of the things that has delayed this transition and the writing of additional content has been my desire to have a completely finished product with the conversion of the site, which was just my way of avoiding doing anything at all on the site. When working on projects for companies, I’ve advocated using the minimum viable product approach to implementation, yet I wasn’t willing to do so on my own site. As a result of recognizing this, this first edition of the site running on Github Pages uses the default Minima Jekyll theme. I will definitely be customizing the theme as I go, eventually converting to some other theme or a completely custom design, but it will be done a bit at a time so as to make sure that something gets done quickly, instead of nothing getting done slowly.

What’s Next?

At this point, I’m not willing to commit to a set publishing schedule other than to indicate that I will do my best to make sure the next post won’t be published 4 months from now. My end goal is to be able to get to multiple posts per week, but we shall see if my ideas for that hold up and continue to grow.

Since using Jekyll in some other projects, there will definitely be some posts outlining what I have learned while working with Jekyll, how you can integrate it into your Magento 1 site, and potentially some nuggets about developing with Magento 2.