Anyone who reads up on setting up a web site at Github Pages will definitely run into Jekyll. Sure enough, Jekyll is what Github Pages alludes to in greeting you with Roll vanilla, or generate a site for your project to quickly get started.

I find it strange, actually, how Github Pages seem to just hint at Jekyll's presence while over at Jekyll's site, it goes all out in saying that Github Pages are powered by Jekyll.

Their strange romance aside, I'm always up for trying out tech so I dove right into Jekyll's docs and whatever I can Google about it.

Simple. Static. Blog-aware. Get up and running in seconds.

I'm not gonna repeat the material out there on Jekyll but simply put, I was sold. I was amazed that even though I dropped it in the end, I still think Jekyll is really cool.

Itching to get started, I jumped immediately to, you guessed it, the Getting Started section of the docs.

Just when I got all hyped, I ran into this bit:

Running Jekyll on Windows
While Windows is not officially supported, it is possible to get it running on Windows. Special instructions can be found on our Windows-specific docs page.

So much for getting up and running in seconds.

Naturally, my enourmous hacker ego could not be easily dissuaded. Looking at Jekyll's cascade of depencies, I'll need Node.js for NPM, Ruby and RubyGems before I can pull down Jekyll. Oh, if I went with Chocolatey, I can skip the NPM part and go straight to installing Ruby and RubyGems and then Jekyll.

I took a step back and thought, is Jekyll worth grabbing all of those, potentially messing up my current machine configuration?

No.

To keep my machine's configuration separate along with resigning to the fact that Windows doesn't really get a lot of love from hipster web guys, I went for Linux virtual machine. After torrenting Lubuntu, installing needed packages, and countless seconds have passed, I finally got Jekyll up and running.

As I said earlier, Jekyll pretty sweet. There's a lot you can do with it from the get go. For the other things I want, I can just write my own extensions for it. Neato.

Actually, that last part was the problem.

In the end, this killed Jekyll for me:

GitHub Pages officially supports the Jekyll plugins found in the GitHub Pages gem. For the exact versions of the Jekyll plugins that GitHub Pages supports, see this list of GitHub Pages dependencies. Other plugins are not supported, so the only way to incorporate them in your site is to generate your site locally and then push your site's static files to your GitHub Pages site.

If I write my own extensions, I will end up pushing the generated files instead.

So, I dropped Jekyll. I deleted the VM. I am sticking to the tools that I already have. And you know what? It's all good. From all these, a new personal project was conceived. :-)