jekyll-starter

A super-simple starter kit for a bare-bones Jekyll instance. To use, just install Jekyll (if you haven't already):

gem install jekyll

... then:

mkdir my-new-blog; cd my-new-blog
git clone git://github.com/cnunciato/jekyll-starter.git .

... and then finally:

jekyll --server

Then open your browser and hit http://localhost:5000.

That'll get you a home page and one post. The rest is all you! See the Jekyll docs for details.

Keep in mind that at this point, you'll have a cloned version of my repository, which you might not want. To start fresh with a commit history of your own (which I'd recommend, unless you plan on contributing to this project), do this from the root of my-new-blog:

rm -rf .git
git init
git add .
git commit -am "my first commit"

What This Actually Does

All this kit does is set you up with the typical Jekyll directory structure, a sample index.html file, a sample post, a shared header and footer, and a couple of tweaks to the default configuration (port 5000, auto-regenerate true). That's it -- no categories, no tags, no Twitter or Disqus integration, no fanciness. Deliberately simple, just the basics. I know I wanted this when I first got started with Jekyll, so here it is -- hopefully helpful to you, too.

To create a new post, just:

touch _posts/yyyy-mm-dd-url-friendly-title.markdown

... where yyyy-mm-dd is a date (e.g., 2012-08-31) and url-friendly-title is, well, a URL-friendly title. Then inside that post, be sure to add at least the minimal YAML front matter (see the _posts folder for an example):

---
layout: post
title: "My Second Post"
---

   It was a dark and stormy night...

Enjoy.