Jekyll vs Marley

Published May 05, 2009

I really tried to like marley, but in the end it turned out to be quite painful, especially the deployment process with passenger. Jekyll is the new kid on the block and can hardly be called a "blog engine". It's a minimalist blog aware static site generator (remember those?), written by Tom Preston-Werner of github fame (it also powers the github pages).

Although 'static site generator' sounds more like 1999 than 2009, there're a couple of reasons you might want to use one:

• text can be stored in a VCS, no database needed
• deployment machine needs no extra dependencies, only a web server (rsync is your friend)
• some dynamic parts of the site like comments can be delegated to javascript, for example disqus, a hosted service
• it's fast and secure

My main problem with jekyll so far has been that it uses liquid as templating language. Fortunately Henrik Nyh has forked the project and hacked haml support into it, check out github.com/henrik/jekyll.

I really like it so far, no more deployment headaches, and local development is a breeze with auto-regeneration of pages and the integrated webrick support.

There's another review on oiledmachine.com if you want to know more and a port called hyde, for those who prefer python.

Update (19/09/09):

Henrik's fork of jekyll is slightly out of date, if you want to use haml with a more recent version of jekyll (0.5.4 at the moment) use my fork instead: github.com/jberkel/jekyll, also installable as a gem:

  
  $ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
  $ sudo gem install jberkel-jekyll