Jekyll

Jekyll offers a simple, blog-aware, static site generation framework for personal, project, or organization sites. Think of it like a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx, or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use it to host your project’s page, blog, or website from GitHub’s servers for free.

The primary advantage of using Jekyll is its simplicity. It doesn’t require databases or updates while allowing you to write content in Markdown. Because it’s built in Ruby, Jekyll makes it easy to customize how your website works by allowing you to use Liquid templating language to process your pages.

You’ll find this post in your `_posts` directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run `jekyll serve`, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

With Jekyll, SEO comes built-in. Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here. Moreover, Jekyll allows plugins to extend its functionality, supporting a wide array of add-ons from third-party developers all geared towards making your website design and development process more diverse and efficient.

As a static site generator, Jekyll loads faster than a dynamic site because it doesn’t have to retrieve information from a database every time a user visits your site. It also has a lower memory footprint since it doesn’t need to run any server-side code. This makes it an ideal option for high-traffic sites and those with limited resources.

# _plugins/breadcrumbs.rb

module Jekyll

  module BreadcrumbsFilter
    def breadcrumbs(page)
      page["path"]
        .split("/")
        .reject { |x| x.empty? || x == "_pages" }
        .each_with_index
        .map { |x, i| construct_path(x, i) }
        .reverse
        .map { |x| construct_link(x) }
        .join(" / ")
    end

    # rest of the code
  end

end

Liquid::Template.register_filter(Jekyll::BreadcrumbsFilter)

In conclusion, whether you are running a blog, managing a project, or publishing an organization’s site, Jekyll offers a straightforward and efficient solution. Its simplicity, inherent security, high speed, and the robustness of built-in features make Jekyll a top choice for creating static websites. Nonetheless, it retains enough flexibility to cater to developers of all calibers, which it achieves by allowing code samples and well-designed plugins.