Jekyll is a static site generator built with Ruby. It is simple, meaning it’s got no databases nor complicated configurations; static, since it generates HTML/CSS and Javascript files ready to deploy; and blog aware, thanks to its many built-in functionalities.

Static Site generators are the next step in blogging engines since they are simple, scalable and pretty fast. Static file serving is cheap, and there’s no need for server side operations when all you need is a blog with a couple hundred posts having all this tools around for static websites.

Jekyll has been called “The Blogging Plataform for Geeks” which is nice, but it’s precisley its main obstacle as I see it. I have a project called Dodecaedro hosted in Github Pages as a starting point, but one of the main reasons the project has now stopped is that I was responsible for doing every update, publishing every post that was ever written. A task that consumed a valuable amount of my time I could spend getting interviews for the website or gathering more writers (which I wouldn’t manage to upload eventually).

As they say at Cloud Cannon:

“The main reasons we hear for not using static websites are: Non-technical users can’t update static websites easily.”

So this is what Jekyll Pub aims to give a solution for. Jekyll Pub, currently in construction, is a rails app you can upload to heroku for non-technical writers to manage site’s posts easily in a RESTful way. This project enables Geeks to build a professional site hosted in Github Pages that can be updated by non-tech people.

Initially, the app will require some Ruby on Rails basic understanding for personal configuration depending on the site needs but it aims to be a complete solution even for non rubyists and eventually for people with no server configuration experience either.