Jekyll finishing up

2013 Feb 22 at 11:23 » Tagged as :wordpress, ruby, jekyll, joomla,

So it's been an eventful journey; after deciding to do away with wordpress (this time for real), I started looking at static blog generators with Jekyll being the very first. Thereafter I investigated Hyde, Mynt, Punch, Pelican and a few other as well. All of them had their pros and cons but in the end, I settled on Jekyll.

Jekyll and wordpress do have something in common;  they are both completely useless without plugins. So far I have installed plugins to paginate the home page and create category and archives (yes, even making category pages needs a plugin). Now I need to paginate the category pages and also create pages for tags. So let's look at the options available.

The first thing I tried was to modify Recursive Design's category plugin based on Ben Curtiss archive generator plugin, after all the latter is based on category plugin. But it didn't quite work out,  for some strange reason categories seem to get mixed up and doesn't seem to be displaying in the reverse chronological order. Then I looked at couple of other category plugins including one on marran.com which didn't produce anything at all for categories!. This lead me to the conclusion that these plugins expect the directory structure to be organized along category lines - ie subfolder for each category and blog posts placed inside. Simply having the category name in markdown may not be enough.

At this point, I must add that though I have learned and forgotten quite a few languages Ruby doesn't happen to be in that list. I do have the ability to read and understand ruby code, thanks to a 'learn ruby in 24 hours' adventure I undertook last year. At this point time, I don't have the energy or the proficiency to wade through Ruby code and figure out what needs to be changed. But then, laziness is a virtue. If I install a tags plugin, this will be quite easy to figure out.