When comparing Jekyll vs Write.as, the Slant community recommends Jekyll for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions for a personal blog?” Jekyll is ranked 1st while Write.as is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Jekyll is:
You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using [GitHub pages](http://pages.github.com/).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro GitHub Pages offers free hosting with a github.io subdomain
You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using GitHub pages.
Pro Can use HTML to set up your page templates, and markdown for your blog posts
Pro Has a built in server
You can spin up a static server at localhost:4000 by running jekyll serve
Pro Code highlighting with pygments
Jekyll has Pygments code highlighting built in so you can create syntax highlighted code blocks on your blog.
Pro Excels at blogging
Jekyll pages are structured by posts, which makes it easier to build a blog.
Pro Decent documentation
Link to docs
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Jekyll supports importing from many dynamic blog engines:
- CSV
- Drupal 6
- Drupal 7
- Enki
- Google Reader
- Joomla
- Jrnl
- Marley
- Mephisto
- Movable Type
- Posterous
- RSS
- S9Y
- Textpattern
- Tumblr
- Typo
- WordPress
- WordPress.com
Pro Has built in watch mode
Watch mode will reconstruct the site as pages are updated which is great for testing.
Pro Large, active and helpful community
Thanks to it's popularity, Jekyll has a large and active community of users. This means there is plenty of learning material available for Jekyll and it's easy to find help from other users when needed.
Pro Customisable with data and collections
Can make sites very different from blogs but with a lot of pages by making templates using data and collections.
Pro Protects your privacy
Works totally anonymously or you can sign up with a pen name.
Pro No sign up required
You can publish without ever signing up or giving out your email address.
Pro Clean writing space
It's made for writing, so there aren't crazy buttons and alerts all over the place to distract you.
Cons
Con It's slow for sites with a lot of posts
Con Little Windows support
Windows is not an officially supported platform and setting it up on Windows requires a lot more tinkering than Linux or OSX.
Con Very simple
The editor only lets you write plain text, select from a few fonts, and use Markdown for formatting. It's difficult to use Write.as for more complicated blogging or creating a full website.
Con The writing space is very limited
The writing window is limited to only about one-fifth of the page, the rest is just blank. You can only see about three lines of text at a time. Seems like a mismanaging of space.