The problem until recently was that there weren't appropriate tools for the job, but this article should prove that's now changing.
Also, it's not really wasting time or money -- cheap shared hosting costs the same regardless of whether you're serving a php/mysql app or static html files. And setting up a wordpress site is probably easier for non-programmers than getting a jekyll setup going.
It's definitely a colossal waste of CPU power though, but that train left the station 10 years ago.
Or a reversal to geocities days ... :-/
Still, I guess I can hack that into the code somehow…
One "prepackaged" jekyll configuration that looks quite interesting is Octopress: http://octopress.org/
- No proper attribution to code that they clearly didn't write themselves. It's not that hard people.
- Time could be better spent making the Jekyll docs clearer. The time they spent creating this could have gone into official documentation efforts and creating a better default in the core
- Would be nice if they could add chuck those plugins into their own repository. That way it would be possible to add them to the plugin list I created on the official Jekyll Wiki
I also wish it had a better base template, but I'm no designer, so what the hell do I know.
https://github.com/josegonzalez/josediazgonzalez.com/tree/ma...
One thing I did with it was create a Web site with recipes on it. The recipe files didn't have any actual content, everything was stored in the metadata. I had the Rules file set up so that they would run the Recipes through a layout that would expand them to HTML (consistently), then that was run through the normal page template.
It also used a preprocess rule to generate fresh items "on the fly" that serve as indices for each recipe type. Again, no content - the Rules file is set up so that the artificial items get all their content from a layout before being actually layouted with the site template.
I think Stasis is great in theory, but a few things are preventing me from using it full time. Namely that I can't pass simple options to a template engine (of which I do a lot).
It appears that you're the author. Can you offer any information on how Stasis is, in some ways, better than nanoc?
"Serve provides the equivalent of the Views part of the Rails MVC. Edit and tweak your websites on-the-fly with the Serve server. And when you are ready to deploy, you have two options. Either export to a pure HTML static site or deploy the source on any Ruby-friendly web host."
One of many interesting ways to design/build a static site. You could then basically use Jekyll as a deploy tool to GitHub pages.
As a designer, I can attest the difficulty of developing using Jekyll, b/c to see your work you need to switch on the Jekyll server, and no changes will compile until you flip the switch again. I know Octopress fixes that, but I'm still wrestling with how to ditch the included theme and build my own.
It may be more simple, but it is nowhere near as powerful.
I do the same, except I host at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which just feels right.
