Jan 31, 2017

Blogging with Git, Jekyll, and Spacemacs

I’ve tried a few blogging platforms in my day. I think the first was Blogger. It was a very brief stint. I used tumblr for many years only because of how nice its theme templating system was at the time. I did try Wordpress once but it was just too finicky with themes when I tried it years ago. There were a couple open-source solutions that required some manual installation that I tried out. None of them really sat well with me. I liked Posthaven a lot, but it just wasn’t as flexible as I wanted it to be.

It was then that it occurred to me how nice it’d be if my blog was just a repository full of plaintext files. That way I could skip the clunky web interfaces and use whatever my choice plaintext editor is, which is Spacemacs at the moment. Not only that, but being able to version my posts with Git gives me some flexibility in editing that would otherwise be impossible without an overcomplicated web frontend. Every edit I commit becomes versioned and can be retreived at any time if need be. It also makes everything more portable. That’s what brought me to Jekyll. Ahhh Jekyll. It’s a static website generator with a lively community and plenty of extensibility, kind of like Spacemacs.

Blogging using markdown/kramdown syntax is pretty great. That was a big motivator in changing platforms for me. Spacemacs even has a markdown layer. Not as fully featured as I’d like. I rarely use it since markdown is so easy to type out as it is. One super nice thing I found was a Jekyll layer for Spacemacs that’s built on top of a Hyde major mode for Emacs. Really takes the pain out of managing blog content. I’m perfectly comfortable using markdown mode and magit for basically everything, but certain tasks like publishing posts can get sorta tedious when performed manually.

If you’re a Spacemacs user and want to get an idea of how I set it up, my configuration is available on github.