Nanoc VS Jekyll

When we decided to open-source our blog and docs, we were spoilt for choices. Today there are multiple well-supported and fully-featured frameworks for open-source content creation. Some of the options that we considered were Ghost, Jekyll, Hugo, Nanoc, and Gatsby. There are even more frameworks beyond these, and each tool has its pros and cons. Which one do we recommend? Well, we don’t. The best tool for you is the one that fulfills your requirements.

My websites use a static site generator, that means I have folders of Markdown files and they get converted by this program to HTML. (I'm using nanoc for nearly a decade, but other generators work fine. I like Ruby, so that's why I never tried any of the new JS stuff.) I don't just hit publish on my whole Zettelkasten, but that would work as well if you point your static site generator to your note archive.

Last time I was evaluating static site generators, Dimples and Nanoc both stood out for this recent-updates reason, among other personal criteria.

https://github.com/waferbaby/dimples

https://nanoc.ws/

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.

First I've looked at the tools I was already familiar with. I have some old blog where I've posted updates during my Google Summer of Code projects. It uses Jekyll to generate static files, automatically published by GitHub Pages. It works very well when you have the website tied to a version-controlled repository, but it's cumbersome when you need to rebuild container images or replace files in a remote volume even for small changes

I like Jekyll [1]. It is simple and open source. I am not sure about the SEO part though.

[1]: https://jekyllrb.com/

I use Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com).

I'd switch to Hugo, but every time I try, I give up. It's not that I can't, it's too much up-front investment and fiddling than I care to deal with (recommendations and tips appreciated).

Jekyll - that I used for The ephemeral miniconf (source)

Publishing tools. By utilising a simple structure of notes stored in a local directories or online repositories like github or gitlab, with the help of the static site generators like Quartz or Jekyll it is only a matter of few minutes and you can have your own digital garden, collection of personal knowledge and everything you written. Feeling inspired? Read this: A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden, a newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web.