I recently made the move from a PHP-based markdown blog to Jekyll, a static-site generator.

Jekyll has a couple of advantages over everything else I’ve tried:

• 100% Static HTML output (No PHP or Ruby required on your server)
• Design, code and preview your site locally
• Markdown posts!
• Lots and lots of free themes available

I’m going to quickly go over how to get started on OSX. Keep in mind only the static HTML is generated using Jekyll. You can then copy the static HTML output to pretty much any webserver you want.

1. gem install jekyll
2. Grab a theme you like. Make sure to hit up the README as some themes require more ruby dependencies. Usually solved with running bundle install from the site’s root directory but YMMV.
3. Note: Themes are actually fully-fledged Jekyll sites ready to go. So the theme you download will end up the root directory for your project.
4. Posts go in the _posts directory. Drafts in _drafts. The file name format is YYYY-MM-DD-post-name-here.markdown
5. When done, test your site locally with jekyll serve
6. And a one-liner to deploy your site:

jekyll build --destination ~/escism.net && scp -r ~/escism.net/ escism.net:~/www/

Too easy, hey?