Getting Started with Jekyll: Useful Resources

For my first post, I thought I would write a few words about the technology that powers this blog. I'm using Jekyll, a static site generator built with Ruby. For hosting, I'm using Amazon's CloudFront service, which serves and caches files stored in Amazon's S3 storage service. This combination (should) allow for very robust, high-performance, and cost effective hosting for this blog. I've used Wordpress before, and its an excellent tool, but running Wordpress means taking time to maintain the blog to ensure security and performance. Using a static site tool like Jekyll allows me to focus on writing content instead, which is where I would rather spend my time.

There have been many thorough tutorials on using Jekyll and Amazon Web Services, so rather than attempt to recreate these here, I am simple going to highlight some of the resources I found useful in creating this site.

Firstly, I needed a basic guide to understand how Jekyll works. I find this guide to be a good one to help get me up and running quickly with the basics of Jekyll.

Since I wanted to deploy my site on AWS, I needed a guide to understand how that works. I found this article on hosting a Jekyll site on CloudFront to be very helpful, particularly with respect to the deploy script, which reduces the friction of updating the site tremendously.

Finally, I needed an real world example of a full featured Jekyll blog. Carl Boettiger's blog served as an excellent example, which I drew on heavily for the initial version of this site.

I have the source and content of this site hosted on GitHub, if you'd like to see how things look under the hood.

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