The pros and cons of blogging with Jekyll

Posted in Computing on 2018-03-21

Jekyll is a flat-files based content management system suitable for building websites and blogs.

Compared to something like Wordpress, a web-based blog content management system which as of 2018 runs on over 30% of the top 10 million websites, Jekyll requires more technical skill. Users write webpages in Markdown or HTML, which is then compiled into flat HTML.

Advantages of Jekyll

• Security: You do not need to maintain security updates, like you would on a Wordpress installation. The number of insecure outdated installations of Wordpress, and other CMS software is terrifying, not to mention vulnerable Wordpress plugins. If you host on Github Pages, you don’t even need to maintain the server itself.
• Easy backup: There is no database to speak of. If you can copy the files, you can create a backup of your site. If your server goes down, you can rebuild the entire site from your local copy.
• Highly flexible: You can easily add custom meta tags. The theme templating system is highly flexible.
• Edit offline: You can edit offline in your text editor of choice. You do not have to deal with overly-clever Javascript based editing windows, or losing drafts, or finding internet access to write. You can write in anything that creates plain text files.
• Efficient: There’s no server-side code like PHP, meaning that the site runs quickly and more cheaply, and can be hosted anywhere that hosts files rather than requiring PHP hosting.
• Github Pages support: You can host your site for free on Github Pages. It even supports HTTPS and custom domains, even both at the same time, which as of 2018 is superior to many paid web hosts and services.
• No insecure login: As of 2018, many self-hosted blogs still don’t use HTTPS, meaning that their login page is handled over raw HTTP. Jekyll, being flat files, is at least as secure as whatever you’re syncing your site with, which in 2018 should be something more secure than FTP.

Disadvantages of Jekyll

• No default theme: Jekyll provides no default theme. A Jekyll user is probably a programmer, not a website designer, meaning that good-looking Jekyll sites, while entirely possible, are rare. Wordpress, conversely, has a default theme and a wide selection of free and paid themes to choose from.
• Requires technical skill: Jekyll requires users to install and run a Ruby script (unless you use Github Pages, but then you have to learn git), upload to a webserver using something like git or rsync, and adhere to a strict filename convention and document format.. This is all explained in the documentation but not necessarily intuitive to new users.
• Poor for multi-user: The default Jekyll workflow is to edit the page, run Jekyll locally, then upload the resulting HTML. It’s tricky for multiple users to keep this in sync, or for users to be given different access levels.
• Poor category support: Jekyll handles categories poorly. There is no such thing as a category page unless you manually create one, and no differentiation between category name and category slug (e.g. “Star Trek” and “startrek”), making it difficult to use in URLs. There is no robust mechanism for subcategories.
• No date-based pages: The default URL scheme is something like 2018/03/21/article-title.html, but there is no page at, say, 2018/03/ or 2018/index.html, which users have come to expect thanks to systems like Wordpress. You can create those pages, but it must be done manually.
• No dynamic features: Since it’s all flat files, the server is unable to run more advanced features like comments, scheduled posts, search, or analytics. Some of these features can be recreated with Javascript or outside tools.
• No RSS feed: RSS functionality is not included by default, but can be added pretty easily.
• Bad for remote editing: Normally, you must edit and build the site locally, then upload that, whereas Github Pages will auto-compile your Jekyll site for you. Either way, however, you need Jekyll or git installed on the device you’re editing from, along with a synced copy of your site source. That’s less convenient than a web CMS which lets you log in.

Summary

Jekyll is a secure, customizable and inexpensive way to publish webpages from plain text with minimal markup, but it is not as powerful or convenient as a true CMS, and lacks many features users have come to expect from something like Wordpress.