Jekyll

2025 was a turning point for this little blog. Leaving the comfort zone of Wordpress.com was neither easy nor painless, especially when I discovered that once the site was online, Jekyll was slow, too slow to be usable. Thankfully, Hugo saved the day, although there are still many details to be ironed out, first and foremost the website’s graphic design.

As I was writing about my transition from WordPress to Jekyll, I knew I had to prepare for another change. From a technical point of view, Jekyll is a fantastic platform: it is easy to program, has impeccable documentation, and works perfectly during the development phase, with a limited number of pages and test posts. But, as I experienced firsthand, when Jekyll is asked to handle a real site with hundreds of posts, performance drops dramatically and response times become unbearably slow (and quite embarrassing, too).

– Source: Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash. As promised (or threatened?) in the last post, this post is dedicated to exploring the available options for hosting a Jekyll-based website (or any other static site generator), whether for a personal blog like the one you’re reading, a professional studio, or a small business website.

As noted in the last post, Jekyll does not have a built-in commenting system, but its themes often allow comments to be managed by connecting to third-party services such as Disqus and similar platforms. The problem with these services is that they can stop working overnight (as happened last year with Muut, which no longer even has a website), or they have opaque usage policies and user data collection practices.

After the first part dedicated to installing and configuring Jekyll, this second part of these annotated notes dives into developing a Jekyll site using a pre-existing theme. On the other hand, developing a theme for Jekyll from scratch is far beyond my expertise, but those who can do it don’t need to read these notes.

This post is not meant to be a detailed guide on installing and configuring Jekyll; for that, there are excellent guides listed below.1 Instead, this post is a commented collection of notes I took while developing melabit.com/posts/en. They are the result of days and days of trial and error, changes in direction, and research to find the right command. These notes were useful for me to remember what I had done and how I had solved the issues that arose from time to time. They might be useful for you to get everything done more quickly and smoothly.

– Source: Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash. As I mentioned in my last post, leaving the WordPress comfort zone wasn’t easy at all. Going from focusing solely on writing something interesting – while a team of system administrators and web programming experts handled everything else – to having to do it all by myself was a massive leap.

– Image generated by the Microsoft Designer AI. Eleven years ago, when I started writing in this personal space, I never imagined I would stick with WordPress.com for so long. WordPress.com is a convenient and reliable blogging platform, but it has always been ill-suited to my way of working. Over time, I learned to live with these limitations, but the idea of changing platforms never left my mind.