I don´t really have new Year's resolutions. But one thing that i wanted for a long time was a wiki for myself to document things I´ve learned from several frontend projects. If it´s useful for me, it may be useful for others too I thought and decided to make this wiki public in form of a blog.

Why Jekyll?

Luckily i had 2 free days between the christmas holidays and I put this blog together. I decided to use Jekyll as the blogging engine.

Static pages

Jekyll is a static site-generator with focus on blogs. I picked it, because I wanted to be able to write my blog posts while I´m sitting in the train when I have no internet connection. When I´m back home, I can easily sync the generated HTML pages with my amazon S3 storage.

Markdown

Since this blog contains only coding-related stuff, I decided to write the whole blog posts in markdown. Jekyll has a out-of-the-box support for markdown and together with the redcarpet gem it´s super simple to create highlighted code blocks. For example:

This block in markdown:

module Jekyll
  require 'coffee-script'
  class CoffeeScriptConverter < Converter
    safe true
    priority :normal

    def matches(ext)
      ext =~ /coffee/i
    end
  end
end

becomes this nice block with redcarpet and markdown:

module Jekyll
  require 'coffee-script'
  class CoffeeScriptConverter < Converter
    safe true
    priority :normal

    def matches(ext)
      ext =~ /coffee/i
    end
  end
end