Today I want to share the wonders of Jekyll, the gem this website is built on.

Jekyll is a Ruby gem that generates a blog-aware static site. Very simple and easy to throw up with github-pages. Very slick and shares navigation and layout across multiple pages.

Installing Jekyll

Install it by doing

gem install Jekyll

This installs the gem and allows you to run

jekyll new your_blog_name

to generate the project with Jekyll files already configured and ready to go.

Running Jekyll locally

In your terminal run

jekyll serve

to start the local jekyll server. Boom, you’re riding Jekyll. You can view it under localhost:4000 in your browser.

Making posts and configuration

To make posts create a new file in the _posts folder and use this funky format YYYY-MM-DD-Hella-Cool-title.md for each post. Your _config.yml file will contain all the text you need to change so it doesn’t look like you just generated a brand new jekyll blog.

Hosting to Github Pages

Fortunately this is the most tedious part of getting setup. Check out the documentation.

For a much more comprehensive experience checkout the official docs.