simple-jekyll-blog

Simple Jekyll Blog

This repo contains a simple blog site that utilises Github Pages, it's built using the Jekyll template engine and styled with the Maxima theme. The posts are written in Markdown and compiled on the Github Pages.

A demo of this blog is available here (Github Pages Demo)[https://lashford.github.io/simple-jekyll-blog/]

Setup Instructions

Install Jekyll on your dev machine, to do this follow the instructions on the Jekyll home page, Install Jenkyll

Verify you have Jekyll installed, jekyll -v

Install all the gem dependencies for the blog locally, so that you can develop and test the site.

bundle install

You can now run the site and see it rendered in a browser.

jekyll serve

Open the following url in a web-browser to view http://localhost:4000 the blog site.

Creating a new Post

Create a new file in the _posts directory, i.e 2018-01-01-blog-awesome.md

At the top of the file you need to include metadata section that will describe what the post is about and provide information to the Jekyll engine, this metadata is called 'Front Matter' in the Jekyll world and is written in YAML, The front matter must be the first thing in the file and must take the form of valid YAML set between triple-dashed lines, here is an example of the metadata:

---
layout: post
title: "Cats Blog"
date: 2018-01-01
desc: "An awesome Blog"
tags: [Awesomeness]
---

Copy the above into your post file and customise as necessary. You can add as much content as you would like after the last triple dash, the posts are written in kramdown which is a superset of Markdown for syntax guides go here kramdown QuickRef

Pushing to Github Pages

Go to settings and enable github pages for your repo. This means when you push new commits to the repo, the Github Jekyll engine will process the markdown files and render the html via the github pages url. The _site folder is never committed, this is a generated directory that is used by the Github pages web server.

Topology of the site

There are three main page templates, index.html, about.md & 404.html this shows the two variants of the page styles, raw html or Markdown. Any additional pages that are created at the top level will be added to the Navigation bar.

Further Reading

Visit the Jekyll site for more examples and documentation on the features available. Jekyll Documentation