Step One on replacing Jekyll, make yaml work

Written on July 26, 2015

As you might remember in my post on replacing Jekyll with Gulp (and my post on Jekyll). YAML will be a large part of getting this working.

YAML Parsing

First am trying to use npm-yaml. Simple installation, npm install --save-dev npm-yaml. And it works great with the _config file that holds general site information. So I try it with the html.

gulp.task('test-index', function() {
  var config = gulp.src('./index.html')
    .pipe(yaml({ space: 2 }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./gulp-dist/'))
})

With that I get a big fat …

I like Jekyll, but is it necessary?

Written on June 15, 2015

Jekyll solved my blog problem: it is fast to set up, free to host, and I actually write content on it instead of endlessly rebuilding the platform. But now I am wondering if I even need Jekyll, or if I can replace it with Gulp and cut out the Ruby dependency entirely.

One of the first “Content Management Systems” I ever wrote was a perl script that took flat text files and wrapped templates around them and gave me html. I cobbled this thing together and thought, huh, it worked. At the time everything was changing and I hardly ever wrote content. So a script that did this wasn’t extremely useful to me. It was more of an academic experience – especially because, at the time, I wasn’t a professional web developer.