I’ve been trying to get my head around Jekyll over the last day or so. I think I’m slowly getting there, but there’s definitely a bit of a learning curve. At a high level I can see how it works and roughly what it’s doing, and some more playing around with it should help get my head around things.

This site is powered by Jekyll as it allows me to generate a static site which is vastly cheaper to host than a whole server running a dynamic site. GitHub Pages allows for integration with Jekyll sites, which is cool, but I’m going about it a different way.

In short, I have my whole site definition (all the Jekyll code) stored in a GitHub repository. This is only for backup purposes and so I can pull the code and work on my site on different computers; it doesn’t actually serve any functional purpose, being on GitHub. After I build my Jekyll site, I push the contents of _site/ to an Amazon S3 bucket. I have a CloudFront content distribution network sitting in front of the bucket, and then the ei6gsb.conorfarrell.com subdomain points to that distribution.

Essentially the entire site is hosted in and running on AWS. I’m a cloud engineer by day, so I’m very familiar with AWS, and setting all this up was pretty straighforward. Perhaps it’s not the most efficient method, however, so maybe I’ll eventually get round to toying with using GitHub pages for the Jekyll site.