SEO blog for everyone: read, think & Do It Yourself!

• SEO-friendly
• Responsive
• Multilingual
• No jQuery, no Disqus
• Static comments that you own

Features

• Pagination for each language via Jekyll-paginate-v2 (non-supported by GitHub Pages).
• Full control over the commenting system with Staticman.
• Instant site search for each language with Simple-Jekyll-Search.
• Sitemap.xml: adding sitemap:false to the front-matter excludes the page from the map; setting sitemap_exclude:[paths] in _config.yml does the same with files and folders.
• RSS-feed for each language, optimized for Feedly.
• Post sharing buttons (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Telegram) + Open Graph meta tags.
• Schema.org markup (WebSite, WebPage, BlogPosting).

NB! TOCs for the posts are compiled manually, because I prefer to change the anchor text when necessary. You might want to use the Jekyll-toc plugin instead. In this case, you can remove the "snippet" variable from the front matter and use {{post.excerpt}} in templates.

Background

This static blog is based on the free Jekyll theme end2end (MIT, ©Fernando Moreira).

It was possible to make the site multilingual thanks to helpful and inspiring examples found in the articles by Sylvain Durand, Anthony Granger, and Klaasnotfound.

I didn't hesitate to choose Staticman as a commenting system, because third-party services like Disqus load tons of scripts, and it is unclear what do they do on the page. Besides, I do not like tracking. Many thanks to Staticman's creator, Eduardo Bouças, for such a great, GitHub-friendly commenting system.

There is a step-by-step guide on static comments implementation on the Made-Mistakes blog. The source code for that blog is available on GitHub. From there and here, I borrowed the client-side nested comments structure.

As of September 2019, neither v2 nor v3 of public Staticman instance was working, and official docs didn't explain anything. So I had to set up my own instance of the API. It was feasible because of detailed Vincent Tam's instructions on deployment Staticman App to Heroku, and his further explanation of the issue. Update! Now my own Staticman lives on Fly.io.

I'm grateful to all the people mentioned for the opportunity to use the results of their work!

Oh, and the cat :cat:: I met a similar on CodePen. Now the pet is resting in the footer of the homepage and asks not to be offered any kind of :mouse: mice.

Quick start

1. Download or clone this repo.
2. Enter the folder name: cd PROJECT_NAME.
3. Install Ruby gems: bundle install.
4. Start Jekyll server: bundle exec jekyll serve.
5. Access offline: localhost:4000.

Create a new post in /_posts or /lang/_posts

Run rake title="Post title" url=words-joined-with-hyphens dir=lang i18n=ID-for-all-translations category=something tags="Tag_1, Tag_2" date=YYYY-MM-DD snippet="The text.".

NB! URL (for non-Latin languages) or TITLE is required, other variables are optional. See the hints in the Rakefile.

By default, the post will be hidden. If you prefer to publish it immediately, add public=y to the rake task.

Create a draft in /_drafts or /lang/_drafts

Run the above rake task with the additional parameter draft=y. In this case, no need to specify date and public.

To preview the draft, run bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts. When you finish editing, add the date to the filename and move the draft to the corresponding _posts folder.

Deploy to GitHub Pages

Since GitHub Pages will not build this site from source, run bundle exec jekyll build to compose a production version of the Jekyll blog. Then place the contents of the _site folder into the source repo for your GitHub Pages site. Alternatively, to avoid manual rebuilds, you can set up a build environment on Travis GitHub Action.

Copyright and license

Content is under copyright. The source code is available under the MIT license.