Author: David Fekke
Published: 4/12/2015
I have decided to move my web site off of the Orchard CMS, and to Jekyll.
If you are not familiar with Jekyll, it is a static site generator written in Ruby. I initially decided a couple of years ago that I would move my site and blog over to Orchard because it is based on ASP.NET MVC, and I am a C# ASP.NET developer. I also write web based software using Node.js, and there are a coupld of CMSs based on Node that are pretty good.
In the process of researching some of the Node based systems, I am came across a number of Node based static site generators. Most of them do essentially the same thing as Jekyll. They use Markdown for posts and pages, which I like.
I am also a fervent user of GitHub. GitHub has a very cool feature called GitHub pages. GitHub pages uses Jekyll in combination with their CI to automatically generate static content.
There are a number of advantages of using static content and GitHub pages. There is no backend database that is required to host the site. GitHub pages as hosted solution will automatically distribute the content over their servers so you get the benefit of having their infrastructure with your site. They have excellent documentation on hosting your website with GitHub pages.