Jekyll is becoming popular these days. It gives people the impression that it’s simple and fast for blogging. And besides, with the support from Github Pages, it’s attraction now not only comes from time saving, but also resource saving (money saving) as well.

But after two days of learning and experiment, I finally gave up. I think it’s better to just keep writing in WordPress. Below are some of my reasons:

I just Wanna Write

Yes, the reason is simple. I just want:

• A place to leave my thoughts, my opinions, my experience.
• A place where my writing can be easily shared with people around the world.

Content is my key, maybe some decoration for my site occasionally, but I’m not that interested in pursuing so-called fully control of everything.

I put all my stuff on wordpress.com now, which satisfied most of my needs. Huge amount of themes, lots of useful widgets. Of course, it’s annoying that you are unable to add some super plugins, unable to customize styles. But do you really need them or it’s just temporary curiosity that drives you?

Control or Management?

Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It’s a generator not a CMS (Sometimes, I even feel that it’s unfair to compare Jekyll to WordPress).
By default, WordPress gives you a full featured admin panel out of box, in which, you can

• Add/delete/schedule posts, and assign privacy
• Modify tags and catorgories
• Monitor visitor statistics
• Control comments

And more… All in one place and visually. However, Jekyll leaves all of these for you to configure. Yes, they have bunch of solutions, plugins, but you need time and patient to make all these done.

Command vs Visualize

It’s hard to make an conclusion on which one is better. Command is fast, and controllable, while visualize is easy to learn and use. As a programmer, I like type commands, it’s cool, it makes you looks like an expert. That’s one of reason that Jekyll attracts me. But I’m lazy too, sometimes life just easier and wonderful if you just move your mouse or fingure around and enjoy the beauty of colorized tables, charts and graphs.

Back to Writing Again

Some said that one of the reasons that makes them move to Jekyll is the love of Markdown. Some disputed the user-friendly experience in writing on WordPress. I use Markdown too, I wrote blog inside of sublime text 2, and use plugin to convert markdown to html, not hard.

Besides, Jekyll does not support markdwon syntax fluently. There’re still lots to consider for better parsing the markdwon styles. So for both systems, you still need to spend time for better display.

Input and Output

In order to move to Jekyll, I need to convert all the posts from WordPress to Jekyll. The convertion is fast, but that doesn’t mean you can use them right away. There’s still some clean up and modification needed like syntax highlight, tags, caterogories and so on.

After data migration, you need design your templates or modify templates from others to suit your needs. You need design or modify the layout, create pages, and so on. During this time, you may confront errors, bugs, wired problems. You have to refer documents, read tutorials to fix them, and understand them. It’s just like headache.

Luckily, there are quick out of box solution, like Jekyll Bootstrap and Github Page for hosting. But there are limitations on using Github, like lack of support for Jekyll plugins. Meanwhile, Github pages will show you 404 page if there’s any mistake inside your blog, and sometimes it’s really hard to find out.

Is it worth for so much work? I think it’s not. Providing there might be more ahead. Jekyll is still under the version of 0.11.2, who can guarantee that there will not be major changes or big bug fix?

Final Thoughts

Jekyll is still young, it’s light and fast. I like some of its features like version control using git, support markdown, Yaml formatted config and so on, but after second thought, I gave up.

But I do believe after a while, there will be more mature solution for out of box blogging, and some easy to use configuration tools, deploying tools for it.