A static website for liblouis based on Jekyll

I must say that I really enjoy working with Jekyll. It is dead-simple and still powerfull enough to the things I need. At first I was trying to go for a Clojure based solution such as static or madness. I had looked at static before and I like it, however I wanted to use bootstrap and wasn’t really into converting the bootstrap html to a hiccup template. madness on the other hand uses enlive, so it would have been possible to use html templates, but what I didn’t like was the fact that the generator and the actual site were basically the same code base just in different (git) branches.

I’m sure these problems could have easily be rectified, static is a very small and simple code base, it would probably be straight-forward to extend it. But in the end it’s the website that I want and the generator is just a means to that end so, let’s go for something that “just works” and is widely used.

Enter Jekyll.

If you look around you’ll find lots of people saying that you should forget about Jekyll and go for Octopress instead. Octopress has everything that Jekyll doesn’t have, etc. Turns out Jekyll has all I need. I can create a nice layout based on bootstrap and do some small tweaks using the Liquid template language which is very similar to the template language used by Django.

Another great thing is that the content is just markdown, or textile. This is ideal for old Emacs hats or screen readers. Since most of the developers of liblouis use screen readers or/and braille displays and often have difficulties with web interfaces this is a big bonus.

So, take Jekyll, sprinkle with a bit of bootstrap and you’ll get a nice static website for a software project such as liblouis. There is a landing page, news, online documentation, downloads and links to the Issue tracker and code repo on Google Code. All you need basically.