I am using Jekyll for my site/blog. Jekyll is a static site generator that creates a HTML site, with predictable page layouts and content with regular presentation such as blogs.
Why use a static site generator?
Static site generators are appealing because they produce secure sites requiring little maintenance that are faster to serve than dynamically generated web pages. With dynamic web pages, a web framework installed on a server generates the page a user sees. A user makes a request, the server queries a database, pulls out the information users want to see, combines that data into an HTML page, then sends that page to a user.
With static HTML pages, the pages are pre-rendered, so the server doesn’t do any of the work of building the page. It only handles sending the appropriate page to the user. This means that static HTML pages are faster, and the computing requirements for the server are much smaller; important in cloud environments where you’re charged for computing power.
Because static pages don’t require servers to perform calculations or query the database, you can deploy them using very simple, low-cost hosting options like an Amazon S3 bucket or GitHub Pages.
I could simply write a HTML page and put it on a server, heacing back to the early days of the web, but static site generators make it much easier to create new pages that use existing templates or modify all of your existing pages at once.
There are many frameworks that can leverage a programming language and allow you to reuse code and process assets for these HTML pages. When deciding what framework to use I had two choices, Hugo and Jekyll.
Hugo vs. Jekyll
With either generator, you can get a templated blog/site up and running in under thirty minutes. In both I write a content file like a blog post in HTML or Markdown. Both frameworks allow me to add variables to content, using the YAML markup language, and consume data files in common formats like JSON and CSV. Both also come with a number of features useful for a blog, like tags and the ability to route content files to finished HTML pages. They are also open source.
Jekyll is written in Ruby, a popular scripting language that was one of the first languages to come with an opinionated web framework, making it extremely popular for building websites quickly. Hugo is written in Go, which was developed at Google with an eye on concurrent execution, optimizing for deployment in cloud environments where computing power is distributed across many machines.
So far this has been a basic comparison. There are bigger ones under the hood such as supporting markup types, templates, hosting and setup.
As stated before, both Hugo and Jekyll are well suited for blogs and other frontend sites.
Why did jekyll win?
Jekyll has the fastest setup, more options for templates, and offers an easier experience when getting started. This was of paramount importance to me. I want to get on with cooler development tasks. I want to start blogging straight away. Hugo’s initial setup is more complicated and would be barrier to getting started. Therefore Jekyll won.
