Meet Icarus Jekyll, my internal tool to create cool marketing websites fast.
Icarus is a collection of tools to make products the simple and fast way. The name comes from Icarus myth, an example of hubris. It's a reminder to never forget to stay simple and humble when creating products.
Today I will introduce Icarus Jekyll, my starter kit for Jekyll to create and deploy static websites (usually marketing websites) easily and very fast.
Icarus Jekyll comes with all the plugins and libraries I regularly use on my websites.
I don't always use them all, but I think it's better to remove the code I don't use for a project. Like that, I have the minus code and I can easily maintain my projects.
Obviously, as a developer, I have a premium account on Github.
This way, I can use Github Pages for hosting my static website kind of free because it's included in my subscription, even if the code is private.
That’s why I chose to used Jekyll to manage my static websites.
Thanks to Github Pages hosting, I can use versionning on my static websites.
I usually use 4 compatible with Github’s plugins for Jekyll. These plugins are installed in Icarus Jekyll.
For SEO, I use jekyll-seo-tag to add metadata tags for search engines and social networks to better index my website and jekyll-sitemap to generate a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap for my website
If a website already exists on the domain, I use jekyll-redirect-from to specify redirections URLs for the pages and posts of the old website.
If the website includes a blog, I add the jekyll-feed plugin to generate an Atom (RSS-like) feed of the posts.
I always use Bootstrap 4 because it's an awesome and very popular framework, and I know this framework very well. For this reason, I can code the templates of a website very fast.
Icarus Jekyll includes a .travis.yml file for continuous integration.
Icarus Jekyll includes a Makefile as a simple task manager.
The Makefile commands allow me to:
Now you know my secret to make and deploy static websites very fast 😊