Have you ever tried to perform the miracle of installing and running Jekyll on a PC? I have, and it doesn’t work too well.
So what actually is Jekyll? Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator for personal, project, or organization sites. Written in Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner, GitHub’s co-founder, and is distributed under an open source license.Instead of using databases, Jekyll takes the content, renders Markdown or Textile and Liquid templates, and produces a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache HTTP Server, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, a GitHub feature that allows users to host websites based on their GitHub repositories.
it does what you tell it to do, no more, no less. It doesn’t try to outsmart users by making bold assumptions, nor does it burden them with needless complexity and configuration. Put simply, Jekyll gets out of your way and allows you to concentrate on what truly matters: your content.
– Jekyll’s “README” file
While watching a tutorial on how to install Jekyll and all it’s dependencies on a Mac, it all seemed so easy and simple. I then returned to my PC in order to do the exact same, it did not go as planned. There were so many unknown hoops to jump through and so little information online. A number of issues were fixed by simply giving in to the demands of the never ending Windows updates. By having an up-to-date system, this allowed for the dependencies to function properly and install all the right packages. However, all of this only got me so far before it all broke down once again.
Having said this, I have been able to build a static site using Jekyll. I revamped an old typography site to showcase this ability to overcome impossible challenges. Feel free to check it out!