A DIY HTML Engine

Jekyll

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Website development and hosting have come of age. Gone are the days of creating websites and blogs from scratch. Although blogging platforms and content management systems have many advantages, they still leave a lot to be desired. The benefits of do-it-yourself (DIY) website development still outweigh a packaged solution. Certain advantages are increased speed, lower or no hosting costs, security, and – more importantly – control over the flow of information and leaks that could happen by using rickety plugins or third-party infrastructure.

Jekyll started its journey in 2008, when a GitHub co-founder released the first build with an aim to provide a modern take on DIY website creation. A simple, static text-to-HTML site generator, Jekyll provides a robust engine to render simple text into attractive web pages, in addition to providing enough leverage for power users to tinker with the code.

The Jekyll advantage originates in its low overhead. Its Liquid renderer and Markdown support allow users to create websites using simple text and scripts to render a fully blown web page. The engine’s sophisticated design forms the backbone of GitHub Pages, so GitHub hosts Jekyll user websites for free.

Simplicity comes at a cost, however. Jekyll has made certain trade-offs to achieve an efficient design. The basic design flaw for website aficionados is the static design. Jekyll cannot render dynamic objects and does not allow the incorporation of a database, both of which tax resources and subsequently increase the cost of hosting a website.

In this article, I unravel the many

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