Meta Refresh 2013

Most of the web development crowd shunned static websites years ago and went for alternatives like WordPress and Tumblr for blogging. In the last one year, Jekyll has made a massive comeback and it is one of the best static website generators out there. The talk would focus on some key topics regarding the same.

Outline

First Draft

Jekyll is a brilliant static website generator used by some really amazing companies like Github. The talk would cover topics ranging from why should one choose Jekyll to the massive advantages it carries

The session will comprise of the following —

1. What is Jekyll?
2. So, what does Jekyll do?
3. The performance gain
4. The massive flexibility
5. Allows to work with haml and sass (or any other css preprocessor you want to put in)
6. How can you host using Jekyll for free?

The simple reason for preferring Jekyll over any other method for building websites, is the simplicity of it’s working.

Jekyll is a brilliant static website generator used by some really amazing companies like Github. The talk would cover topics ranging from why should one choose Jekyll to the massive advantages it carries

UPDATE #1

I am changing the draft after a great response by Benjamin Lupton. The ideas he has given me to put into the talk are interesting and they do create a lot more scope than just restricting the talk to Jekyll.

The session will comprise of the following —

1. Introduction to Static Site Generators
2. How do they work?
3. The performance gain
4. The massive flexibility
5. Allows to work with haml and sass (or any other css preprocessor you want to put in)
6. Looking at different generators – Jekyll, Octopress, DocPad, Stacey, Kirby and Movable Type
7. How do they handle rendering, why do they do it different, why is X better than Y?
8. Why are static site generators becoming popular now? What were the events leading up to it? Why is the history important to understand the cultivation of the innovations.
9. Who are the key players behind them, why did they work on them, why do they continue to work on them?

Speaker bio

I recently moved my blog from WordPress to Jekyll. I thought it would take a couple of days, but I was able to wind up the process in two days to be exact (leaving out the design).

So, I am Aniket and I am 19. I have been working with web development not for long but in this time I have worked on a number of applications (a majority of which were written using Codeigniter). I have recently moved on to working with Laravel but my forté lies in front-end semantics.

Links

• http://aniketpant.com
• http://aniketpant.com/speaking
• http://github.com/aniketpant/aniketpant.github.com