An Open Letter to Tom Preston-Werner

I’m a huge advocate of static site generators and have always favoured Jekyll as my go-to static site generator.

Unfortunately, it’s fallen out of active development. I’ve been trying to contact Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo) about it, but so far: nothing. (To be fair, I have gotten two replies, but they were not productive other than saying that he was looking for new maintainers. That was May 2012.)

So here’s my open letter to you, Tom, about saving Jekyll from open-source oblivion.

Tom,

Hope you had a pleasant weekend.

Here’s what I wish to see happen with Jekyll:

1. Start an Org on Github and move the Jekyll repo to that org
2. Add several maintainers to that org (I’d be happy to help out as a maintainer!)
3. Add another author or two to the Jekyll gem so that we can gem push and release new versions.
4. Give at least one other person access to push to the source of jekyllrb.com so that the docs can be updated

Problem I’m trying to solve:

Jekyll is incredibly popular and is an incredibly powerful tool, but is not being actively maintained centrally, so though the world around it is evolving, it is staying stagnant and plagued by the same issues it has been for the last four years.

Solution:

Add maintainers to Jekyll to help deal with issues, push new versions, and update the documentation when you don’t have the time.

The great thing about version control systems is that changes can always be reverted.

Thanks in advance for your attention to this problem and willingness to help it continue growing.

Warm Regards,
Parker Moore