I think most developers who decide to start a blog find themselves in a dilemma: I know HTML and CSS, and I can make my blog, it is going to be super light and fast… And so begins the descent into the rabbit hole. Three months later, the blog may be ready, but nothing was published. So today’s pro-tip goes to you who wants to put content out there and doesn’t want to get caught up in code decisions at first.

I must have given this tip and defended this choice to many people who want to start a blog and don’t want to stick to the big platforms. So here it goes for you too: Use Jekyll.

That’s right, an open-source tool written in Ruby, Jekyll can turn many text files into a static website ready for publication. Okay, okay by now, you might be thinking you’re going to fall into that dilemma of building from scratch again, but that’s not the case, one of the reasons I like Jekyll so much is that there’s a platform with a vast collection of ready-made themes called Jekyll themes.

The first version of this site here came out of a theme made by Taylan Tatlı called Moon. There are so many themes to choose from, that I bet you can find one that suits your needs; most of them with step-by-step instructions on how to customize the theme itself. Put this together with GitHub Pages, and your site will be up and running fast.

Once you have released your site, you can start making improvements and modifying your theme little by little. Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages helped me, in the beginning, and it may be what you need too ;)

So, have you chosen your theme?