Improving speed in Jekyll-Atom

Jekyll-Atom is pretty slow at building sites.

There is a noticeable delay between hitting ctrl-S and the site being updated which really slows development.

The fatal flaw is the jekyll build is building the whole site every time which as your site grows results in longer and longer builds to the point that the preview server becomes pretty useless.

The latest Jekyll version adds an experimental feature for doing incremental builds which is an extreme improvement. Usual disclaimer about experimental features not being 100% reliable which means although the speed is greatly increased there maybe some cases where you don’t get the results you are expecting.

I have enabled it on this blog by adding incremental: true to my _config.yml and only really found one issue with it. Adding a new post doesn’t cause blog.html to be updated so although the post exists and has been generated there is no link to it. This can be worked around by saving blog.html again.

I wont be making this a default option in Jekyll-Atom for now at least, if you want to use it just add to your _config.yml.