It’s about time I started diving into SSG. And AsciiDoc support wasn’t negotiable.

To make a long story short, I wasn’t wholly satisfied with my previous framework of generating websites using AsciiDoctor and a shell script. I won’t lie: a lot of this was due to my relative lack of HTML and CSS knowledge, but I can’t say I was happy with the documentation of AsciiDoctor and it’s CSS stylesheets, either.

That knowledge can be remedied in time, however, so I certainly won’t rule out moving back to that framework once I have some more webdev knowledge under my belt. In the interim, however, I opted to "join the herd", so to speak, and start getting up and running with static site generators.

One of my hard requirements for a generator, however, is AsciiDoc support. And wanting to keep things relatively lightweight on the output—​especially where JavaScript is concerned—​was certainly something I desired as well. Fortunately for me, somebody went and made a very convenient list of AsciiDoc SSGs, and given it’s use in GitHub Pages, I decided to try Jekyll as my first real SSG.

Setting it up was fairly straightforward, as was getting the AsciiDoc plugin installed and operational. Less straightforward was futzing with several smaller pain points in the AsciiDoc converter, and the continuing theme of lacking documentation. So it was something of a journey to dial in my settings, includes, and AsciiDoc attributes to make everything render well for me.

Some things are still not fully complete, and I plan to address them in due time. But for now, everything works fairly well, and I particularly like the dated URL system Jekyll employs for blogposts. The default Minima theme is very nice to my eyes as well, and it took only minor adjustments to get things spread across the page to my liking.

Overall, a good result. There are still some oddities and wrinkles present, but hopefully I’ll find the time to further refine the end result! And, perhaps more importantly, document the process further down the line.