Kapil Sharma's new blog

Existing blogs

I am already blogging on my personal blog; blog.kapilsharma.info. However I was never regular on that.

Time issue, out of contents etc? Yes, they were reasons but major one was, editing in WYSIWYG editor. I was never comfortable with WYSIWYG. So even though I am using workpress, I never loved it.

Wordpress developers, please do not get offended, its just a matter of personal preference.

As developer, I know markdown and love to use that. Jekyll provided me just what I am comfortable with. However taking decision of using Jekyll was not easy, obviously changes are always difficult to accept. Why should I change anything if it is working just fine and another option have some learning curve.

I tried octopress and jekyll earlier, but never succeed. However recently I was looking options for managing PHP Reboot site. Its just a community management job so I needed an easy way of managing phpreboot site.

Wordpress was first option (although not loved one) but managing PHP Reboot’s monthly magazine (collection of blogs) seems not easy in wordpress. I certainly didn’t wanted to write costom code in wordpress.

First serious encounter with Jekyll

So my hunt begin again, looking available modules in Joomla, Drupal, wordpress and other options as well. After google a bit, Jekyll and Octopress appears as possible options.

Why I decide to give jekyll a try?

Just after some search on google, Jekyll seems perfect match for me. My requirements were:

• CMS. Oops yes. I cant make HTML every time I add/update something.
  • And I am supposed to update magazine daily.
• But no CMS. Well my personal experience, they are not very good at optimizations. As developer, I always preferred frameworks over CMS.
• Other then adding new blogs, article and tutorials in magazine, remaining site pages are just simple static pages and may be a blog.
• Well being a community site, it is supposed to support some dynamic features; at least comments and contact us form.

Few compromise

At first sight, I though Jekyll, being a static site generator, will not match my requirements. Still I decided to have some compromises like:

• Comment: Well leave for now.
• Contact us: Hmm not good but will give a email address on contact us form. Most difficult decision.
• Magazine: Not perfect but updating markdown is just like typing for me.

Fixing compromise

• Comments: Jekyll sites use discus for comments. Quick test shows it worked as expected.
• Contact us: Google form is working for now.