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Hello World!

Hello World! This blog hosted is on Github. It is written in Markdown, powered by Jekyll. A cool new toy which I just discovered at Github Pages. I had being playing with it for the last 2-3 hours.

Why is it cool? Firstly, it is hosted on Github. Secondly, whenever I push my blog’s repository to GitHub, Jekyll will transforms it into a static site. Not just Markdown file, it supports Textile too. No database needed.

Why avoid databases?

Scott Chacon (@schacon) of Github has this to say:

In the past, I have had two catastrophic data losses from my hosting providers losing a good number of my posts. Each time I thought I would finally remember to setup something that would back them up, but I never did. 1

According to Jekyll’s creator Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo):

I was tired of having my blog posts end up in a database off on some remote server. That is backwards. I’ve lost valuable posts that way. I want to author my posts locally in Textile or Markdown. My blog should be easily stylable and customizable any way I please. It should take care of creating a feed for me. And most of all, my site should be stored on GitHub so that I never lose data again. 2

Using databases are fine for a couple of things. But for a blog, I think that it is diffucult to do backups or to migrate to another host/platform. Heck, even Wordpress generates static html files of your blog post via caching plugins for faster page load, so why use a database at all?

Finally, this blog was setup with the help of:

Edited: Plugins are disabled on Github pages due to security restrictions, according to @mojombo. So, the truncation plugin won’t work on Github pages unless you generate your site locally and push the resulting HTML to a Git repo :/

How do to get started?

Here’s an intro to GitHub Pages.

6 March 2013