I’ve recently moved my website from AnchorCMS to Jekyll. I didn’t think it was necessary to have a WordPress solution only for a personal blog that has less than 10 visits/month so I went for a static website that is not tied to mysql and php. With this change I’ve also switched from Apache2 to Nginx. I hope that with this change my tiny VPS is not going to need much resources in the future. I still have to tweak the CSS settings, so expect more changes soon enough.

I took the head logo from Jonathan Robson and the theme from John Otander. So I’d like to thank him with this occasion.

How I did it

First thing I did was to google it :) I found a couple of good tutorials, one of them is this one from ines which is comprehensive enough to get a good understanding about Jekyll.

Another good resource is this youtube video by Martino Jones.

I highly recommend to go through them both before installing it on your machine.

Ok, so you’ve got the theory now, let’s get ready to do this!

Installing

Dependencies:

Here is the list from the official documentation

  • GNU/Linux, Unix, or macOS
  • Ruby version 2.0 or above, including all development headers
  • RubyGems
  • GCC and Make (in case your system doesn’t have them installed, which you can check by running gcc -v and make -v in your system’s command line interface)

Here it really depends on what OS you’re using. I’ve installed it on an Ubuntu so the following instructions will be for Ubuntu.

$ sudo gem install jekyll

Starting your blog

$ jekyll build

$ jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0

You will want to use –host 0.0.0.0 in order to have the server running on all IP addresses that are assigned to your server.

Customization

Next thing after you install Jekyll is to search for a theme that fits you. There are many theme sites out there, but I found this one that had enough blog themes.

You can also customize it by going under the hood, down in the CSS area. But unfortunately I’m unable to understand CSS yet, so I won’t talk about it :)

Go ahead and try it! But first measure the resources used by your current setup to see if it makes a different to you.

Edit: I’ve removed the YouTube iframe because it added 500KB to the webpage unnecessarily, now this page has less than 700KB. I got inspired by this article and I’m trying to help.

2024 Edit: After switching to Hugo and Github Pages the total size is 158KB and load 228ms. Not too bad.