Jekyll Lambda – Minimal Theme for Jekyll

https://github.com/lauris/jekyll-lambda

by lauriswtf • 11 years ago

61 51 11 years ago

github.com

CJefferson• 11 years ago

While this is slightly off-topic, does anyone have any current opinions on Jekyll / Pelican / Middleman / etc?

In particular websites which are only part blog.

itake• 11 years ago

I think they are great, but because statically generated sites can limit growth, just because if you want to add backend features (forms, commenting, etc.), you may have to switch platforms or use third party services.

I host my own blog on Jekyll and that works awesomely well and I have no plans for needing a backend server. If I was a startup and wanted to add small marketing features (email collection, surveys, etc.) then I would consider moving off of it.

spdustin• 11 years ago

Not related to the original article, but that's an ideal use-case for Amazon Lambda.

sgallant4• 11 years ago

I just set up a Jekyll site on S3 and used formkeep.com for form endpoints. Worked great (but costs $7/month).

hamxiaoz• 11 years ago

They can all be accomplished by utilizing MailChimp: - Emails signups - Contact form

danso2• 11 years ago

Middleman is amazing, I build all of my sites with it...it's a nice mix of Jekyll's ease with the flexibility of being able to write as much templating/backend logic as you need (basically, the ability to use Erb). For any site in which you don't need a database, in which your content can be serialized as several hundred JSON/yaml objects, I think Middleman is fantastic.

astockwell• 11 years ago

+1, I started with Jekyll for my personal site but quickly switched. Ultimately I found Middleman had much more functionality baked in, especially things like the ability to use a yaml file of projects to drive a portfolio page, or to fetch a series of release URLs from GitHub and include them on a page upon build. Probably all possible with Jekyll, but not as easily at the time. YMMV.

seagreen2• 11 years ago

Hakyll is fantastic -- works great as a blog, but is also very extensible. I used Nanoc before that and it was also excellent.

I don't think you want Pelican or Jekyll in this case. Their emphasis is definitely on blogging and you'll have to fight them some if you move away from that niche.

wuschel3• 11 years ago

Are there any examples of a non-blog use case with Hakyll e.g. a partly static, partly generated website?

How does Hugo compare to Hakyll?

krick• 11 years ago

What exactly opinions do you want? I tried all of that stuff except of Middleman and ended up writing my own. Jekyll is way too opinionated, no way to make the website exactly what you want it to be. Hakyll is very configurable, but the very fact that it's written in Haskell and needs to be recompiled after every structural change turned out to be way more annoying than I thought. Pelican would be nice, but the last I checked it was quite unstable and buggy, unlike Jekyll and Hakyll. In the end I thought that writing 200 lines of Python code to do exactly what I want is easier, than to explore what's out there and how to make it to do what I want.

hardwaresofton4• 11 years ago

I personally like Harp for it's simplicity (which mostly comes from NPM and node magic):

http://harpjs.com/

http://harpjs.com/docs/quick-start

fustkilas• 11 years ago

Another happy Harp user here. The team behind Harp has also created Surge (http://surge.sh/) which is simple & well thought out.

I find that Harp and Surge get in the way the least, thanks to "convention over configuration". Just give me my Jade & Stylus, thank you very much.

I'd be interested in hearing how others use Harp with current tooling - React / CSS modules / JSPM anyone?

mbrock• 11 years ago

make and bash go a long way!

Zikes4• 11 years ago

For Go fans, I had a lot of fun playing with Hugo: https://github.com/spf13/hugo

frigg• 11 years ago

I tried Pelican just to see how they work and what's so special about static site generators. The downside for me was having to go through the process of re-generating the site and committing just so you can fix something as simple as a grammar error or a comma. It gets old fast IMO. The other annoyance was with images included in the post. You have to copy then write the image path because you don't have something like a pop-up box which just selects the image.

So I switched to ghost and I'm fairly happy for now. The downside of this is that I have to pay ~$4 a month for a shared hosting, which is fine by me.

brazzledazzle• 11 years ago

I've yet to try it but that's the downside that would slightly annoy me. Probably not enough to turn me off of it, but maybe. Would post-commit hooks and some kind of automation make it easier?

girvo• 11 years ago

Right, I agree! But that's why Harp is so neat: harpjs.com

iheart2code• 11 years ago

I'm using Jekyll for my portfolio, and it is working out quite well. Unfortunately, I can't get paging to work on multiple collections at once. So it would be great for a site that's ONLY a blog or ONLY a portfolio, but I recently added a blog and it seems to be holding me back.

Portfolio: http://www.thejeremywhite.com/

Source: https://github.com/iheart2code/iheart2code.github.io

0xCMP• 11 years ago

I use jekyll but since I've been learning Go I have wanted to use Hugo which seems to have a lot of nice features. Middleman seems to have the most features though.

Still, it's nice that jekyll doesn't require much work to deploy to github.

budparr4• 11 years ago

I've used Jekyll (quite a bit), Metalsmith, and Hugo and tested some others. They all fit a particular use-case, like Hugo is incredibly fast, Metalsmith is incredibly flexible (it's something like a Gulp for static sites), and Jekyll is well-rounded, has a large community, and has the most progress with content editors for non-technical users.

I run a site with resources for static site generators, The New Dynamic, and you can find a lot of articles on those and others there: http://www.thenewdynamic.org/

kmfrk2• 11 years ago

Jekyll has a huge community, is actively maintained (it being the backbone of GitHub’s blog system) with plenty of plugins, and has pretty decent documentation (that can always be expanded with a pull request).

I find those factors tend to trump smaller shortcomings. There’s always going to be some stuff, but being able to ask a question and get an answer is very important. Take that from someone who did his first static blog in Blogofile …

Windows support has been non-existent, which is obviously huge to some, but Jekyll 3 aims to remedy that. I haven’t played around with Jekyll 3 on Windows, though, so you only have their word for it. Ruby on Windows is already … interesting.

Zikes4• 11 years ago

It doesn't seem to support pagination, e.g. 10 posts per page, next/prev buttons, etc. Is that a Jekyll limitation, or a theme limitation? If the latter, would a reasonably competent Jekyll user be able to implement that?

benoliver999• 11 years ago

It's not too hard, and is documented here: http://jekyllrb.com/docs/pagination/.

Zikes4• 11 years ago

Thanks, looks straightforward enough.

kmfrk2• 11 years ago

I highly recommend skeleton.css (getskeleton.com) as a minimal theme for bootstrapping any website. Almost no learning curve, and it looks good, even if you don't use the HTML it prefers.

That said, I have customized it a bit, but it's fine right out of the game, especially the typography.

hardwaresofton4• 11 years ago

Also in the same vein --

http://purecss.io/

Main difference I find is a little more styling/ramp up and quotient-based gridding (you can attach semantically named classes for 1/3rd of the space or 2/5ths)

lewisl9029• 11 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I've come across Skeleton before but not Pure.

Pure looks amazing. I especially love the fact that it's modular. The base is only 1.1 KB, and if you don't need anything other than buttons and grids, you can get by with less than 3 KB of CSS!

budparr4• 11 years ago

purecss is no longer in development. I've used it and it was a good start, but I've since shifted to using bourbon/neat, which is more a library than a framework and has a light footprint. https://github.com/yahoo/pure/issues/414#issuecomment-132315...

tombrossman• 11 years ago

I've got basic Skeleton and Pure CSS sites for Jekyll available on GitLab below, since these are my two favorite starting points. My minor changes in adapting them to Jekyll are released to the public domain.

https://gitlab.com/tombrossman/Jekyll_Skeleton_CSS_Boilerpla...

https://gitlab.com/tombrossman/Jekyll_Pure_CSS

sgallant4• 11 years ago

I've used skeleton A LOT for a quick and dirty responsive css framework. But unfortunately, the latest version doesn't support nested columns. A big disadvantage, IMO.

sgallant4• 11 years ago

Great theme! Are there any disadvantages to using Disqus as a commenting system?

bmelton• 11 years ago

Disadvantages of using Disqus as your commenting system:

1. Your comments are in disqus, and not local to your server 2. Users with JS disabled are not going to see the comments 3. Friends and other would-be commenters may be banned by Disqus without having been banned by you.

As to point 1, I believe there's an API that you can retrieve your messages from if you ever want to migrate away from Disqus, but the other two (I think) hold true no matter what.

andreineculau• 11 years ago

Always nice to see works striving for minimalism. Years ago I was also looking for a simple theme, bumped into Scribble, and forked into Klotter (swedish for scribble).

Source: https://github.com/blogandreineculaucom/blogandreineculaucom...

Theme live at: http://blog.andreineculau.com (blog content not so much alive)

sgallant4• 11 years ago

I love the minimalism. Jekyll?

Fastidious• 11 years ago

My Jekyll install (https://collantes.us/) is also minimal. I truly love Jekyll, and the flexibility that presents: add post (.md file), commit, done.

geraldbauer• 11 years ago

FYI: The Dr Jekyll's Themes Directory @ http://drjekyllthemes.github.io lists 100+ ready-to-use (fork) Jekyll themes including some more minimal themes.

Sir_Cmpwn• 11 years ago

My blog is fairly minimal and also built with Jekyll, and licensed under MIT. Anyone is welcome to repurpose it for their needs:

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sircmpwn.github.io

amai• 11 years ago

I recommend Urubu (http://urubu.jandecaluwe.com/) for building static websites.

Jekyll Lambda – Minimal Theme for Jekyll

Related Stories