Bridgetown VS Jekyll

Jekyll is a simplistic framework for static websites that originally sparked the static website and JAMstack movements. While there are many similar frameworks with more features, Jekyll remains one of the simplest on the market. It has been somewhat forgotten and hasn't evolved much lately, to the point where some people decided to take matters into their own hands and fork this framework into something called Bridgetown.

I use https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ and it works pretty well. Very easy to use and deploy. Blog posts are listing line by line, like "index". I didn't customize much from the generated code(only logo and header). You can take a look: ruzig.com

I'm using bridgetown because I like sitting on the bleeding edge, its basically a newer Jekyll which I would recommend checking out too. Bridgetown has a great modern dev experience but its missing some of the ecosystem from Jekyll. Not a problem for me because I'm really comfortable with Ruby.

If you want to have a different UI or your blog to look in a very specific way I recommend using Jekyll or Bridgetown.

If I wanted to post a simple website today I would look into Jekyll. There are a ton of articles and answers to common questions etc. It itself is written in Ruby but using it will not likely help you to learn Ruby. One-step in the direction of learning Ruby and getting a simple website could be Bridgetown. This will start you down a path of learning Ruby and not Rails. We use Bridgetown for our company site at Flagrant.

In the Hotwire Turbo world specifically, several discussions about integrating transition animations also took place and a few promising approaches emerged, namely the Turn project or the transitions in Bridgetown. There is also a chapter in the Noel Rappin’s Modern Front-End book and an interesting article but overall, frankly, this topic still fells somewhat early-stage and exploratory.

https://www.bridgetownrb.com/ static site generator. Can be linked with prism of you want a kind of panel to add new articles.

FYI. I used Bridgetown as a static site generator recently and rather enjoyed it. https://github.com/bridgetownrb/bridgetown.

Jekyll

If you don't want to use Jekyll as your static site generator for GitHub Pages and you want to have a custom domain for your GitHub Pages. This post is for you!

Jekyll is a static site generator that transforms Markdown files into a fully functional website. Everything is generated into plain HTML, which makes it simple to deploy on platforms like GitHub Pages.

Obviously, there are a dozen choices for generating static websites (efficiently and quickly), from the classic Jekyll to the new Next.js. And you are good to go with any of them as long as your confident with it. I choose 11ty because:

That would be an improvement, but it still wouldn't be equivalent to what you can do with Ruby and Jekyll. For example I do [1] so I don't need to put dates in my post names, which also fixes a bug [2] I encountered but was never fixed.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/68287682/660921

[2]: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll/issues/8707

In your repository settings you need to turn on GitHub Pages to make it pull Jekyll content (that's the magic✨ default GitHub Pages build tool) from your GitHub repository.

If you're looking to start a blog (or if you're thinking of redesigning yours although you haven't posted in 2 years), you'll stumble upon a lot of options and it can be incredibly daunting; and if you stumble with the newest Josh's post about his stack it is easy to feel overwhelmed with the shown stack.

Here I am, signing off from a self-hosted WordPress site and finding a welcome change in Jekyll, a blog-aware static site generator. There is nothing new about this, several well-known bloggers have already migrated to Jekyll in the last few years. Ever since Tom Preston Werner created this software in 2008 and published his infamous article about Blogging Like a Hacker, it has become the go-to thing for at least the small and indie bloggers.