I Love Jekyll I Hate Jekyll

Bad title for a post but thats how my relationship with the [jekyll][1] static site generator stands.

I love it:

• It just lets me blog - no shitty admin console, no extra jazz, just keyboard noise –> blog post with some very simple magic in between.
• it serves static html - no wordpress security headaches, no server load problems, instant load times given that i load off an SSD on my [host][2]¹.
• no db - that much more faster, that much less software to setup and get going
• markdown - the new posterchild of content creation. plain text with intelligence!

I hate it:

• it wont let me just blog - I need to be in front of my system with my git repo setup, with my keys in place or i cannot even access the content. Geek = 1, Blogger = 0, -1 even!
• im not a laptop toting geek all the time.. sometimes, i’d want to just post an idea or a eureka moment on my blog - nope, cant do! pull up my laptop, type it in, check, commit, push, take a deep breadth, go hungry!
• plugins - partially, wordpress has us all spoiled with plugins - most plugins and widgets are noise, some are needed - throwing in a google map for example, or a post this link to twitter button or some shit - there’s waay too much html involved with jekyll for any non-textual tasks. No, I dont have a problem with HTML, thats my bread and butter - but when its blogging, and I want to support my post with data, I dont want to make mistakes with HTML. I just want a way some things work!
• Jekyll is too simple! Its ONE config file, a bunch of folders where you’re expected to throw some files into and bam - your blog on the world wide interwebs! Take your blog beyond this and you’re doomed - external HTML for a form, external HTML for a subscribe to rss thingy, external HTML for getting a visitor’s email - thats more work than blogging!

I’m not going to make the change away from Jekyll - not any time soon… Just a bunch of thoughts that I wanted to get off of my chest!

And oh! While extremely useful, I hate having to copy paste file names and yaml metadata for every blog post! That sucks!