Jekyll and Hyde (and punch)

2013 Jan 2 at 16:33 » Tagged as :wordpress, jekyll, punch, hyde, node.js,

Does Jekyll power this blog now  the like I promised it would? short answer is I am working on it. The long answer is below.

Jekyll is easy to install and get started by to go beyond an absolute bear bones site or blog you need plugins. Plenty of plugins. As with any good open source eco system, there  is always more than one plugin that does the same thing. The trouble is to figure out which one is the best for the task at hand. Ever been to a restaurant where you couldn't decide what to order because the menu had far too many choices in it? So you end up asking the waiter to recommend something which turns out to be just awful?

Now this is the very thing with Wordpress. Whenever you want wordpress to behave differently from the default (and the default is unusable), there is no choice but to download a plugin. The alternative, editing the spaghetti code is the stuff of nightmares. So messing with too many plugins is something I would rather avoid whether it's Wordpress or Jekyll.

So in spite of my aversion to Node.js I decided to give Punch a try. Installation was a piece of cake and same could be said about setting up a simple site, but here is the catch, the default template system is Mustache, which I don't like. I want something that supports a little bit of logic. Now to look elsewhere maybe Hyde. Now I hasten to add that there is nothing wrong with Punch, it's just Node.js and Mustache that goes against my religion.

There is a lot  of confusion over Hyde because there are two projects named Hyde by the same user on github. When you are reading a blog post or article on Hyde, you are never quite sure which version they are talking about. Even the most recent project 'githyb/hyde/hyde', hasn't been updated in nearly a year.  A project that has not been recently updated is that way because it's either extremely stable and feature complete or abandoned.