My mind is constantly running, and it’s a form of cognitive offloading to put these ideas down, almost like placing them in a mental drawer that I can come back to later on.
The Problem: Too Many Ideas, Not Enough Focus
My original thought was to build a blog. I figured I would use a service like S3 for hosting. I would write my articles in Markdown and keep everything in Git, have the process to transform in html and dedicated css.
Finding a Simpler Way
I found a better solution for hosting and publishing. Instead of S3, I chose GitHub Pages. It’s free and designed to automatically build and host static websites. It’s a “push and publish” kind of workflow, which means I can focus on writing instead of on deployment pipelines and server configurations.
For the writing itself, I needed a tool to convert my Markdown files into a website. I looked at a couple of options:
-
Jekyll: Built with Ruby, it’s a very straightforward tool for generating blogs.
-
Hugo: A much faster tool built with Go, designed for massive websites.
The idea of using Hugo and find an excuse to learn Go and distract myself again was appealing. I remember I learnt Ruby when Ruby on Rails was really trendy.
I chose Jekyll because of its simple design and, most importantly, its tight integration with GitHub Pages. It’s a perfect match for what I need: a no-fuss way to get my thoughts out of my head and into a website.
The Final Setup
The setup was simple. I created a GitHub repository, named it specifically so GitHub Pages would recognize it, and then selected the no-style-please theme. I chose this theme because it’s as minimalist as it gets—it has almost no CSS, which means there are no visual distractions. The focus is entirely on the words.
I also set up a local development environment with rbenv and Jekyll so I can write offline and see my changes instantly. Now, when an idea pops into my head, I just write it down, and it’s published with a simple git push.
This first post is a perfect example of what this blog is about: taking a complex problem—getting too many ideas out of my head—and finding a simple, effective solution.
cat Gemfile
source "https://rubygems.org"
gem "github-pages"
gem "no-style-please"
and in _config.yml at the root:
title: Cognitive offloading
description: Emptying the mind, one article at a time
author: j3r3myfoobar
email: jeremy... (@) gmail.com
theme: no-style-please
Posts are written in Markdown files and must be placed in the _posts directory. or example, _posts/2025-09-10-hello-world.md.
For example:
---
layout: post
title: "Hello, Jekyll!"
date: 2025-09-12 10:00:00 +0200
categories: [blogging]
---
some very important content here ..
create an index.md for the root content:
---
layout: default
---
# I'm J3r3my.
something important ...
## Posts
{% for post in site.posts %}
- [{{ post.title }}]({{ post.url }})
<small>{{ post.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}</small>
{% endfor %}
Assuming you have ruby install, if you want to see how it looks like on your local machine before publishing run bundle install and after run bundle exec jekyll serve or simply push and forget when everything has been setup.
PS1: You need to enable Jekyll in the Settings of your repository. It will create a GitHub action for deployment.