Ec.Static is Just Jekyll...
Friday January 30th, 2026
Over some time I had off while recovering from surgery, I decided to work on an idea I had to make creating blogs easy. It was a templating tool that would parse Markdown files, with YAML attributes at the top, and generate pure, static HTML files, to be simply hosted on any old HTTP file server. I thought this idea was novel. I'd only heard of solutions using databases, or even some, like Yellow CMS, that still used Markdown, but required a running server.
It turns out that this already exists as Jekyll. I've actually heard of it, but assumed it was another blogging engine that used some kind of database and server-side rendering. But, I assumed wrong and it's great! Jekyll looks like a really great, mature tool that will become very important I think in the Web 1.0 renaissance we are seeing. I love Ruby, and the Liquid templating engine seems very intuitive and clean (much cleaner than my PHP templates).
I was honestly so surprised how similar my tool ended up being like Jekyll. Both use Markdown and YAML! I guess it shows that Ec.Static was a good idea, I just didn't get anywhere near to it first.
I'll still keep Ec.Static running my blog for now and maybe switch to Jekyll in the future if I see some features that look appealing to me. For now, I like that my blog is in a good running state where I can quickly make new posts, even tweet style posts, and don't need to tinker too much anymore. More projects to come!
Have a good evening!
Nate