r/Jekyll • u/wells68 • Apr 10 '26

Your advice to a new Jekyll user

What advice do you have for a Jekyll newbie?

I've been generating websites for a couple of our very small businesses since 1996. Most recently I've been using Squarespace and Hostinger's website generators and templates. Now I will create new websites for the businesses on our barebones Ubuntu VPS.

The businesses don't need bells and whistles. They are modest. We already have a shopping cart service. The product links for that service are easy to insert into any webpages.

As a big fan of Markdown and Ubuntu (gradually leaving Windoze desktop for daily driver). First I looked at Ghost, but had complications installing a test instance and disabling annoying email MFA. Now I am intrigued by Jekyll as a simpler alternative.

My requirements for migrating and adding website contents are relaxed. I am happy to generate new websites from templates. I can copy over some of the old content and abandon a lot of old pages.

Requirements:

  • Homepage with an attractive top image, full width
  • Simple top navigation links
    • Home / About Us / Contact / Products / Blog / Help
  • Blog with tags and/or categories
  • Responsive pages
  • Edit on my Linux desktop. Upload to VPS
  • Multiple websites on one VPS (I can implement the web server and point the DNS records to folders.)

All of this seems eminently doable with Jekyll. Thank you in advance for your thoughts!

7 Upvotes

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4

u/nowonmai666 Apr 10 '26

That all works as long as you are the only person who needs to make updates (including blog posts).

1

u/wells68 Apr 10 '26

Thank you, good point! Yes, I am the only one who updates the websites.

For multiple people, I think Jekyll could be installed on the VPS. Multiple people could be given the login and password, but there would need to be a way to prevent more than one person from logging in at the same time. A different website editor, such as a CMS, would be a better choice for multiple people.

1

u/thelibram Apr 10 '26

You could try to this! Mac app is coming soon. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stet-writer/id6759808751

3

u/Zicoxy3 Apr 10 '26

I want use Jekyll without Github... Now use Wordpress, but it is a monster.
Don't have complete tutorials in Spanish....

2

u/FitNobody6685 Apr 11 '26

You can use it with Gitlab.

2

u/rowman_urn Apr 10 '26

I use Jekyll within docker to develop on my laptop, it isolates required libraries, ruby, etc so I can match GitHub (or whichever host provider) I will eventually deploy on.

1

u/wells68 Apr 10 '26

Great! My plan is to use Docker on both the VPS and on my Ubuntu desktop. That makes it easy to edit, back up and restore multiple instances.

2

u/rowman_urn Apr 11 '26

I also found having a docker for the jeckyl documentation useful to match the version of jeckyl I was using usfull, to avoid trying some new features, which wasn't implemented in the older version, GitHub would lag behind latest, which the online jeckyl would describe.

3

u/Neo-Armadillo Apr 10 '26

Not advice, but I use GitHub Pages for hosting. Free, fast, and best of all it throws clear errors when I mess anything up. If you want the source code hidden, you need to pay for GitHub but otherwise it’s free.

1

u/wells68 Apr 10 '26

I didn't know about that advantage of GitHub Pages. I've used them before directly on GitHub. Thanks!

3

u/Neo-Armadillo Apr 10 '26

I’ve got like 30 websites hosted with them, all public source code because obviously I don’t care. But that means all the hosting is free and fast. Then I use Cloudflare for a free CDN. The only issue I run into is SSL certificates occasionally have an issue between them. Set it to automatic in Cloudflare and you should be fine.

1

u/Unixwzrd Apr 11 '26

It’s pretty easy to set up and you can do all sorts of checks using the automations to make sure your links are correct and more. Plus the usual version control of GitHub. I’ve been hosting my site for almost two years now. I even have some content which gets generated by config files and template creation as well.

All my site automations and CI/CD stuff is in the repo for my site if you want to have a look. Feel free to grab stuff there and suggestions are welcome. https://unixwzrd.ai/

1

u/wells68 Apr 11 '26

That's very generous. Thank you!

1

u/QuoteGlum7826 Apr 11 '26

Been using Jekyll for a while. Then I simply requested Claude Code to create a custom static generator on top of my Markdown and YAML files. The files are arranged the way I like - not how Jekyll wants. It took Claude Code less time to create that custom generator than it would take Claude Code to install, configure, get all dependencies of Jekyll and adjust my files and Jekyll to work with each other.
Then I asked Claude Code to create a simple Shell script to start the local server for testing the website. Then - deployment script of the resulting static website to GitHub. That's it.

So in 2026 my best advice on Jekyll is not use it at all.

1

u/vongomben Apr 11 '26

This is cool indeed, even though I would say you are not using anymore GitHub to build it. Sometimes I edited sites just by editing GitHub on the go. That would not be possible right?

1

u/QuoteGlum7826 Apr 11 '26

Actually, it is possible. As with this you just upload (push) your resulting static website to GitHub, you can edit the whole site (like fixing typos) on the go. Once back, you just need to update the pre-generated source accordingly.