I started to notice jekyll appearing around the web and decided to start read up on it.

At a previous job I was looking for a documentation tool that our creatives and developers could use to together to communicate. We needed a living style guild. Getting approval for anything that was not already installed was impossible. Then I discovered Doku wiki. It was written in PHP and we had PHP installed. But the more interesting thing was it didn’t use a database. It used text files in markdown format. This made approval unnecessary. So I got it installed and start writing markdown. After a while, and after constantly referring to it in IM’s. Developers start to take notice and wanted to play too. The developers and media developers (a programmer/creative hybrid like me) start to get noticed by the creatives. Apprehensive about doing anything like code but will to try, they were instantly excited after seeing that markdown just a text file with meaningful descriptor. I know it was a success when one of the code-phobic creative asked if I could teach her some reg ex so she could fix a mistake. It was a one of the greatest viral experiences that I not only got to be a part of but also started.

So back to this jekyll thing. Jekyll is basically the same thing but instead of a wiki it focuses on site/blog generation. You structure your folders, add some data files in yml format, write pages in markdown, then push button and you have a web site. If your know some css or scss, html, markdown, and read it is literal that easy. I think I had this jekyll site running in 8 minutes. 3 minutes if you don’t count all the extra reading I did to make should it was that easy. Within 20 minute I had changed the page and folder structure twice and got the site running github.

The other thing that interested me was that it was written in ruby. I have had to learn ruby for automate acceptance test the pass year. So downloading and running gems is easy for me to do.

The last reason is that some people at my current job want me to talk about how I use Vim. I am not sure why I have only been using it a year and a half now, and after several failed attempts. I have tried blogging but found I really don’t have much to say. I tried using the blog as a sketch a day thing to force me to feel guilty if I done draw but days turned into weeks and weeks to years. So this is an attempt to tie it all together practice it all.

Hope to post more soon.