For those who don’t know, this blog uses Jekyll. Jekyll is old, established, and has a lot of plugins and themes available. It’s also free and open source. It uses Ruby to convert Markdown files into static HTML files. Meaning i can keep the posts in a non-proprietary markdown format, and change to whatever format I want in the future.
Not being tied down to any provider formats is mostly what kept me from ever starting a blog. I used to run a Wordpress blog, but honestly in this day and age, I’d prefer something static that can be served from anywhere.
Ruby is the elephant in the room, used by Jekyll to convert the Markdown files into HTML. I have’nt coded much and I dont have any of the setup for it. But Docker to the rescue! I have a simple docker image, that builds the site and puts it in the right place. I can easily extend this with Github pages, which is coming soon.
]]>_posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.
Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:
YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP
Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file. After that, include the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.
Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:
def print_hi(name)
puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.
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