But that's understandable as gauging intent of words without the voice can be very difficult and easy to misinterpret, especially on the Internet and a site like Hacker News. I think people are too quick when it comes to interpreting the intent of someone else's words. I wasn't attacking Dustin Curtis, I don't know him, I know of him and I have no problem with him whatsoever. The competitive edge that Svbtle had was its exclusivity, an edge they've now lost by opening it up. I think Svbtle is great, but at the same time, how is it any different to that of other blog platforms that tout themselves as having a clean interface for writing content? We have Medium, Ghost, Tumblr and even Quora. Send me a tweet.I would like to clarify my comment as some people has misinterpreted what I actually meant. If you have suggestions on a better toolkit or thoughts on this one, I’d love to hear them. Today, I do this by hand with Apple’s Preview if the file size is greater than 200 kb. I’m missing a tool for automatically resizing images to the right dpi and width, to maximize page load times. I’ve instrumented all the sharing actions (Twitter, FB, HackerNews etc.), the subscription actions (email + rss) and also the Read this Next feature at the bottom of the page. The blog is instrumented with Google Analytics with custom events. Typekit provides two fonts, P22-Underground for the titles and Minion-Pro for paragraph text. I designed the site using Bootstrap.js, Twitter’s excellent library for responsive layouts. Also, R has a huge collection of different tools for creating box plots and maps, and also doing more sophisticated types of analysis like linear modeling and moving averages. Plot.ly is a wonderful alternative particularly when I want to build interactive charts.įor a while I used Excel/Numbers, but the programming nature of R makes it much easier to re-run previous analyses with new data. To analyze data and create charts, I use a code editor for R called RStudio and two terrific libraries from Hadley Wickham, dplyr for data manipulation and ggplot2 for visualization. An important difference between the two: Svbtle allows authors to use an existing domain name and Medium provides one for you. Svbtle and Medium are also wonderful options for individuals. Ghost is likely a much better alternative for most companies who need to control their own design. But I’ve found it’s very buggy.īecause of these challenges, I don’t recommend Jekyll for everybody. There is one project that provides a UI on Jekyll/Github sites called Prose.io. Though Github seems to have accelerated this process quite a bit recently. Because the site must compile after each change, I wait about 5 minutes before a new post goes live. To publish new posts and fix errors in previous ones, I use git, a command line tool. I wish Mou or other tools also checked grammar the way Microsoft Word has for more than a decade.Īlso, there is no save or publish button with Jekyll. I use Mou, an open-source markdown editor, that has a preview pane so I can see what the final post will look like as I type it. Instead, I write the posts in a text-editor on my laptop. There is no website to create a new post. I host on Github Pages, which is about $7 per month.īut the speed comes with a handful usability costs. Security is much stronger and hosting is cheaper. Because the website is pre-compiled, users load pages faster. When a visitor arrives, the content has been prepared already. A static-site generators (SSG), Jekyll eliminates the database by compiling posts as I write them, instead of when the user asks for them. Said another way, content compilation occurs at the time of request. When a blog post page is requested by a blog visitor, Wordpress pings the database for the post content, injects the content into the blog template and sends it to the browser. Most blogging platforms (Wordpress, Tumblr, etc) store user posts in a database. Also, I wanted the ability to instrument my blog to run experiments and understand the impact on reading habits which meant hosting my own blog rather than using a platform. At Google, I saw the importance of page load times on user experience and that has always stuck with me. Jekyll is an open source project created by two engineers at Github. I chose Jekyll because Jekyll sites load faster than most other blogging platforms. Jekyll is the blogging engine Github is the hosting provider Mou is the app I use to write these posts and RStudio is the place I analyze data and make charts. I use four main tools Jekyll, Github Mou, and RStudio. I’ve been getting a few questions about the tools I use to publish this blog, so I figured I’d write about it and reveal the machinery behind the curtain.
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