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CloudCannon is running a free online conference for “all things Jekyll” this weekend. If you’re interested in learning more about the static site generator, you can join in to hear from a great lineup of eight speakers, including Tom Preston-Werner (a.k.a. mojombo, creator of Jekyll), and Parker Moore (current Jekyll Core Team lead).

The conference takes place on Saturday May 2nd from 10am-5pm PST. This is the first JekyllConf and CloudCannon hopes to inspire further awareness and adoption of Jekyll.

If you’re not familiar with Jekyll, it’s a a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It’s what brettterpstra.com runs on, and how I’m easily able to provide the page load times and site stability I do. Jekyll also happens to be the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use Jekyll to host your project’s page, a blog, or any website from GitHub’s servers for free. A quick look at the stats will show that Jekyll is by far the most popular generator, with the largest community support.

“Jekyll is an awesome technology and it feels like it’s on the cusp of being really big. Part of JekyllConf is showing where Jekyll came from, what it’s capable of and where the technology is heading. It’s no longer just a tool for powering hacker’s blogs.” – Mike Neumegen, JekyllConf organizer and CEO of CloudCannon.

If you’re interested in JekyllConf, you can register at JekyllConf.com to receive the latest updates, and follow @JekyllConf on Twitter. Discussion will take place on the day of the conference using the hashtag “#JekyllConf”. Recordings of all of the sessions will be available following the conference.

A note about CloudCannon

I also wanted to mention how CloudCannon fits into the Jekyll world. They’ve built a true CMS that allows you to build sites using HTML and/or Jekyll, and manage them via a web interface.

Their current public product is focused on static HTML, but they’ve found that Jekyll offers a more powerful system with easier management, even for larger sites. Not to mention it opens up far more blogging possibilities.

Since late last year CloudCannon has been building support for Jekyll. The goal is to bring more Jekyll power to non-technical users, not to mention allowing collaboration by teams who would not previously have been able to get everyone on board.

I’ve been part of the private beta testing for Jekyll support, and during the conference CloudCannon will be announcing a move to public beta. For a demo of the CloudCannon Jekyll CMS in action, check out this video.

Sign up for the free conference at JekyllConf.com, and be sure to follow them on Twitter to take part in the discussions.