I’ve been using Jekyll to generate this blog for over a year now. It’s great. I don’t have to worry about security exploits, or replicating the arcane installation of PHP and associated libraries that my hosting provider happens to have installed. And it’s a blog. I shouldn’t need a CMS for what amounts to very static content.

The good thing about jekyll is that it’s easily hackable if it doesn’t do exactly what you want. The sucky thing is that over 400 people have done just that, making it incredibly difficult to get the right combination of features that actually work together. The franken-jekyll running this blog for the past year was a combination of mojombo’s master, mikewest’s tag_index and master, as well as some of my own fixes for bugs I came across or features I wanted.

So when I eventually got around to merging in new updates, things fell in a heap. Thankfully, in the past year, extending jekyll has become a whole lot cleaner. There is now jekyll_ext, which allows you to add features without changing the jekyll code itself. All of my original modifications have now either been fixed, or implemented in jekyll_ext.

So now I have, thanks to an upgraded markdown engine and some jekyll_ext plugins:

• related tags on each tag page
• popular tags (for the sidebar)
• post summaries, for long posts
• footnote support¹ (via kramdown)
• table of contents generation, for that one post I wrote with a TOC (via kramdown)

If you notice any post’s formatting is a bit off now due to the upgraded markdown engine, please leave a comment (or shoot me an email) and I’ll fix it up.