Good job Jekyll and the team around Jekyll Admin!

After lots of time away from writing publically, I have come back to it. Not knowing what platform to use, I tried many different ones.

Medium. A truly disappointing experience to say the least. My biggest gripe: If I contribute content, why should I have to pay to view content?? WTF? It felt like a stab in the back the first time I saw the paywall appear after having published various articles that drew a non-significant “read” rate.

Ghost. I was stunned by its elegance and UX. I spun up a self hosted instance in a matter of minutes on DigitalOcean. But for a one person show, its overkill. It seems that it is geared for an organization that can pop out articles every day with different writers each. Think a heavily invested content dominated organization…

Jekyll. Tried it years ago. At the time it did it’s job. But my biggest overriding complaint at the time was the UX of creating and editing content. All static was a PIA to maintain. Manipulating html, links, etc. Editing and make the print show up for the end user in a readable manner, became a road block to churrning out any creative content.

Finally, after much deliberation, I decided to try give Jekyll another go around. Especially, after seeing Jekyll Admin, I was sold back onto it.

It’s simple, elegant, easy to deploy, and free to host on Github.

So to this, I give a round of applause to the teams developing these platforms for us to use free of charge!

Clapping gif

Cheers, Andrew