Hello Jekyll

Porting My Website to Jekyll

When I first wrote this website back in early 2019 or so, I didn’t know much about webpages or web development and wrote every page in static HTML from a template page that I copy-pasted any time I wanted to add new content. Clearly, that isn’t really maintainable since I’d have to make any layout changes across every page of my website manually.

Fast-forward to today, and that bit about not knowing anything about web dev is still true, but I decided to template-ize my website to make the layout more maintainable as I add/change things. Enter Jekyll: a static site generator that does pretty much exactly what I need and is also hosted on GitHub pages, which I’m using to host this site.

Thankfully, Jekyll’s official docs include a page that details how to convert an existing website to use Jekyll. I was able to convert my old HTML page template into a Jekyll-friendly version, and it includes support for blog-like posts out of the box, so I figured I’d write about it here.