What is jekyll (on windows)!

Websites can be created with several different tools!
Most of the small sized websites are made with static pages.
Here they comes ... tools like Jekyll that are really simple, blog-aware, static site generators. Jekyll, that is based on the ruby language and runs from command line (faster to update everything), gives you a lightning fast solution to generate a static website starting from a template directory containing with regular text files. Jekyll parse all the data with a converter, that in most of the cases is Markdown, and with the Liquid renderer creates a beatiful static website that can be published on any hosting service without extra specific technical skills.

Github Pages Offline on windows

Jekill is the main engine used on GitHub Pages and, in the case that you want to move from there to another hosting you can build your website offline and upload it on your preferred hosting service. It's like your offline github pages on windows.

How Jekyll works on Windows

Jekyll works on windows quite the same way as on any other platform. Time ago I've wasted a lot of time into trying to use it on windows systems due to some compilation errors othe depending libraries. Nowadays it's quite simple and straightforward (if you just want a faster solution to use jekyll on windows go ahead) to install Jekyll even on windows systems!!
You just need to download and install ruby on rails and run $ gem install jekyll

Download Jekyll for windows hassles free!

If you don't want to spend too much time you can download from this website the Portable version of Ruby with Jekyll for windows systems! It's just a mingw32 shell with ruby, ruby dev kit, jekill and all the necessary libraries..

How to use Jekyll on Windows

The commands are always the same as on *nix systems. Launch "RUN.bat" and you will see the terminal with the bash shell. Locate your your subfolder, automatically generated after launching the shell, where you are going to do all the necessary things that is in
home/<Yourcomputername>

From the terminal you can write the necessary commands to build your static website: $ jekyll build -s ./source -d ./destination With build you tell to jekyll to build the html files from your source folder located in ./source and output everything in the destination folder located in ./destination. Those folders must be valid.

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