It is time to start a new site and the question is should I use Jekyll, as all my other current sites use (those that aren't still hand-coded HTML) or try something new. I've been wanting to try something new for a while but common sense (?) says that I should just use what I've been using, because why keep reinventing the wheel? I'm not saying that I'm some sort of big industry or innovator, but I did write some plug-ins and generators for Jekyll and I liked being able to add/modify the functionality and wanted to continue to do so.

Sometimes you decide that you just need a tag (and category) cloud. The top search result was from SuperDevResources by Kanishk Kunal, which worked pretty well, but I didn't like the sizes, and wanted to have fun colours. Here's my version: Read more

Many and varied are the ways to add comments to your static website. Most of them involve subscribing to services which, if you're running your own domain on your own server, might strike you as the wrong solution. "But," you might say, "if I want to have a comment system on my own site, it would not be static anymore. CGi's are so '90s and who needs the attack vector?"

There is annoying little documentation about writing a generator for Jekyll, particularly since when searching for examples, there is so much noise in form of hits for "static site generator." Two decent examples are from Ricardo Lopes and Starr Horne of Honeybadger.

Starting at the beginning, you want to be putting my_generator.rb in _plugins/ in the root directory of your Jekyll site directory.

For an absolute "Hello, World" we can do:

class Generator < Jekyll::Generator
  def generate(site)
    puts "Hello, World!"
  end
end