Jekyll

A mechanical engineer with a website, how peculiar you might say! I promise it’s easy and you can do the same. This is a static-site hosted on github pages that I can easily edit and push changes to using my home desktop. It is build using a Ruby Gem called jekyll which really was the catalyst for me to create this site. If something this good looking had to be created from scratch, I would still be stuck in mid-2000’s html land.

Install Jekyll

I would recommend following the jekyll Quick Start Guide for instructions on setting up a Ruby environment, bundler, and jekyll. This is a relatively painless process, and can be done on any OS.

Create your site

The way that I built this site and the way I recommend others to is to start with a template and then modify it to meet your own particular needs. There are sites that aggregate jekyll themes that can be used or purchased. I forked my site template from Dean Attali’s beautiful-jekyll which has really expanded my perspective of what is possible using a static site. Responsive design and consideration for phones were not things that I had originally anticipated when I started looking into the css, but I am glad that I had a foundation to modify and experiment with.

Advanced Generation

Jekyll uses the Liquid template language to process templates. You can read jekyll’s documentation here. The biggest takeaways, in my opinion, are the use of liquid variables to iterate through build pages, and define how certain pages are to be treated.

In Short

Jekyll makes build a static site extremely easy, and GitHub has removed the cost normally associated with hosting a site. There’s nothing to lose, so good luck and go try it!