After running this blog with Jekyll and github-pages for over two years, I ran into Scroll and fell in love with the newspaper-y style and minimalist setup, so I wanted to try it out.

Getting started

Scroll is a easy to install as

npm install -g scroll-cli

or

git clone https://github.com/breck7/scroll
cd scroll
npm install -g .

and then running scroll init inside the blog directory. After that I converted all posts to .scroll files and pushed them to a separate branch.

Changes

The structure changes a bit, with all files in a flat structure (aside from images, those can stay in a subfolder). For the previous markdown in my posts I just added the markups.scroll to avoid too much rewriting. There are a few features that would go away with the switch, namely analytics and tagged pages. Though tagging seems to be replaceable with categories and I might have found a way to add the javascript to each page.

Running locally

For local rendering, it’s now scroll watch instead of jekyll -s, though you can also run scroll build and open the .html files in your browser directly.

Github Pages

Comparison

Comparing the Jekyll design to Scroll

It gives the site a different feel, but while I do really like the look of it I’m sticking with the Jekyll version for now, mostly for the Markdown and out of the box analytics support.