Getting Started With Jekyll

2014-10-06

I have been told that it’s good to write a blog. Something about self-promotion and helping other people…

I originally wanted to create something through rails, but, having thought about it, it would have taken a while to set everything up correctly. No need to reinvent the wheel…

Jekyll is a blogging / website platform built with Ruby. It’s what I would have aimed to build, only simpler, more efficient, pre-built and with an active community behind it.

Jekyll’s main selling point is that it integrates text files well into a static site.

It’s simple to use and set up out of the box:

~ $ gem install jekyll
~ $ jekyll new my-awesome-site
~ $ cd my-awesome-site
~/my-awesome-site $ jekyll serve
# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000

If you’re lazy, I’d recommend not doing this, though. Jekyll Bootstrap, discussed below, has a few more features that may be useful.

Jekyll Bootstrap

Jekyll Bootstrap uses Twitter’s bootstrap and includes a number of extra in-build functionality including clever rake tasks, themes and comments.

Here’s a really good starting point: Jekyll Bootstrap Quick Start Guide

One of the great things about Jekyll Bootstrap is that it integrates well with Github Pages. This lets you host your own site for FREE! You get the custom domain of your_github_username.github.io.

The only tweak that I had to make with the current version of Jekyll Bootstrap was to change the default github._com_ to github._io_

Updating Your Settings

Go to _config.yml to update your settings:

Github Username
Twitter Username
Analytics Tracking ID
Disqus shortname

You’ll probably have to go to Disqus to create a shortname and Google Analytics to get your tracking code.

Generating New Posts

Once you have everything set up, you’ll be able to run

$ rake post title="Hello World"

To create new posts or

$ rake page name="about.md"

To create new pages.

There you have it - a free, fully functioning static blog set up in only a few minutes!

Here are a few more tips I recommend to make it even easier to use Jekyll and Markdown.

Using Jekyll with Vim

There’s a great vim plugin for jekyll. This lets you, anywhere in the file structure, to access your current posts or to create a new one.

map <Leader>jb  :JekyllBuild<CR>
map <Leader>jn  :JekyllPost<CR>
map <Leader>jl  :JekyllList<CR>.

Ultra fancy Markdown editing.

I use Marked 2, which is a fairly slick markdown live previewer. You can call it straight from vim using this mapping in your .vimrc:

noremap <leader>md :!open -a 'Marked 2' %<cr><cr>

(Assuming you’re on OS X)