#3
For the past few days, I've been reworking the blog. Now you can see the final - of course for the time being - effect.
I conceived this page as a pretty old-school project: no ready to use blogging software, the code ought to be written directly by myself, but also no fancy server-side technologies - you don't need this kind of stuff for a blog without any traces of interactivity (but who knows, maybe I will implement commenting at some point?). Back to the roots so to say, to the times of web 1.0 and the first web page I ever made. Everything was better when you were younger, eh?
I soon realized that this approach somewhat restricts me and makes writing new content a bit more bothersome - I got too used to the separation of information and structure so prevalent in the modern web development, I suppose.
Luckily, Jekyll* comes to the rescue. Using this neat tool, you write simple HTML or text files as your content, create one or more templates describing how it should be presented and let Jekyll process the data to generate the ready site. It's like having PHP scripts run once for every document the user may access and cache the output.
Jekyll gives you the best of both worlds. Your output is static HTML, viewable directly from the hard drive and deployable on any server. But it's generated dynamically, from content and layout description which are separated. Thus changing the design of the whole blog or generating an RSS feed (I also have one now, check it out!) doesn't pose a major challenge.
My first encounter with Jekyll was pretty positive - it's definitely worth trying out.
* I first read about Jekyll here.