Static Site Generation with Jekyll

15 Jun 2022

Late train Jekyll + bandwagon DALL·E

I have started using a static site generator for this website, Jekyll. Before I was just editing HTML and CSS files, plus a bit of Python. Creating a website “from scratch” that way had a simplicity that appealed to me, even if I was re-inventing the wheel sometimes. But static site generators are so commonplace and easy, it was only a matter of time that I switched to one.

Overall, I was happy I switched. Using Liquid templates and layouts are nice, altough nested layouts can feel like a headache sometimes. Writing posts in Markdown is probably my favorite feature so far (not that MD->HTML is unique to Jekyll). Creating pages or indexes from data files is also a breeze.

However, one feature I was sorely missing was extensive pagination. I wanted to paginate content, tags, and categories, but it turns out Jekyll (by default) can only paginate posts. I did quite a bit of research and testing of multiple work arounds, inlcluding plug-ins, combining two Jekyll blogs into one, making everything posts, and even new static site builders. By the time I figured a plug-in would probably be the best solution, I was too weary to figure one out. So for now, I’m using a hybrid of Jekyll’s tools and Python for pagination of that section.

I also reset the style to a blank canvas, white background and black text, as I consider what the next look will be.

What the homepage looks like right now.