gulp VS Jekyll

A little gulp and npm knowledge is beneficial, but not required

Many web pages use CSS and JavaScript files to handle various features and styles. Each file, however, requires a separate HTTP request, which can slow down page loading. Concatenation comes into play here. It involves combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file. As a result, pages load faster, reducing the time spent requesting individual files. Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are some of the tools that can assist you in speeding up the concatenation process. They enable seamless merging of many files during development, ensuring deployment readiness.

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

NPM packages include a wide range of tools such as frameworks like Express or React, libraries like jQuery, and task runners such as Gulp, and Webpack.

Another way to optimize is by reducing the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files by removing comments, unnecessary spaces, and line breaks. Combine CSS and JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the number of server requests. This can be done using build tools like Webpack or Gulp.

Gulp - the streaming build system

Browserify was great at bundling scripts, but what if we need to transform code - Say compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, for this, a new group of tools for the web was born, which focussed on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp.

What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language improvements (jQuery, lodash, ...), but very, very few exist that are the same now as they were then. Another fun historical reference: issue #118 of "JavaScript Weekly" (February 22, 2013) includes a first link out to asm.js.

Reminds me of gulp

GULP: Gulp is basically a task automation tool. The file that you create in this tool, is a plain JavaScript file that you can run to automate you menial tasks. It comes under the category of package manager. Gulp is very developer friendly and easy to learn. For more info: https://gulpjs.com/

This blog is running on Hugo. It had previously been running on Jekyll. Both these SSGs ship with the ability to create excerpts from your markdown content in 1 line or thereabouts.

Jekyll

In future, if you want to move from Jekyll to something else, you just have to worry about that `_posts` and `_assets` folder. They may have different naming convention but you can just config-managed it or change it to your choice. This is why I suggested owning that two yourself.

You also may not worry about FrontMatter[3] (meta in the header) and its accompanying jazz by asking Jekyll to use the plugins `jekyll-optional-front-matter` and `jekyll-titles-from-headings`. These comes as part of the officially supported Jekyll plugins[4] by Github. That way, you are just writing a human-readable plain-text spiced up with Markdown and readable by almost every other Static Site Generator.

Now, play with the `_config.yml` that Jekyll generates for you from the theme above to define your post dates, navigation, and others. Jekyll is one of the OGs — the Gandalf of Static Site Generators. If you have a problem, someone somewhere has solved that.

Did I missed something? I was supposed to write a blog article for my website on this one and this comment will serve as my starting bullet points.

1. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

2. https://jekyllrb.com

3. https://frontmatter.codes/docs/markdown

4. https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-s...

"Using the Chirpy theme for Jekyll."

I would suggest looking into static site generators. Some popular examples, which are used myself are: - Hugo: https://gohugo.io/ - Jekyll: https://jekyllrb.com

In terms of GitHub stars, SSGs like Next.js, Hugo, Gatsby, Docusaurus, Nuxt.js, and Jekyll top the list. Some popular SSGs even host conferences and workshops, providing resources and networking opportunities for those looking to explore more advanced topics in depth.

I created my blog using Jekyll, a great open-source tool that can transform your markdown content into a simple, old-fashioned-but-trendy, static site. What are the advantages of this approach? The site is super-light, super-fast, super-secure and SEO-friendly. Of course, it’s not always the best solution, but for some use cases, like a simple personal blog, it’s really a good option.

Yes, it's Markdown and I use https://jekyllrb.com with the theme "jekyll-theme-hacker" to generate the site. I quite like how simple it is.