It was after reading Barry Clark’s post on Build A Blog With Jekyll And GitHub Pages, I became fascinated with the idea hacker-style blogging on GitHub. So of course I jumped in.

What is Jekyll anyway? It’s a static site generator for plain text using markdown. There’s no database to manage, and great customization options for layouts, permalinks, posts, and more.

First things first, I develop on Windows. Does that make you cringe?

My first hurdle was finding out that Jekyll wasn’t supported on Windows officially. Ugh, but okay, there’s unnofficial support. Turns out installing Ruby was a mess to begin with. I fixed a couple errors before stumbling upon madhur’s Building portable Jekyll for Windows. This sounds awesome right? Aside from modifying some environment variables, it was a breeze. I was able to $ jekyll immediately.

Happy ending right? Well there’s a bonus ending. Turns out Barry Clark introduced a way to create a Jekyll blog without the setup or use of command line!