I’ve changed my website from basically a wordpress blog to a jekyll site. Wordpress has a lot of extras that I just really don’t need. The main one being a database. I’m pretty comfortable with html, css, etc. and I can learn markdown, so I think jekyll will be pretty easy.

So far, I have all the posts here (though they need to be cleaned up a bit) and the sorting of posts by category and year. I also have my basic pages done. The last big piece is to work in all of my old gallery of pictures pages. But now that I have a better grasp of jekyll, I think I’ll be able to figure this out. Below is the original jekyll post that comes in with the gem. I thought I’d leave it in. I also tried to use the jekyll-hamilton theme, but couldn’t really get it working. So I’ve modified the minima theme to look like it a bit.

You’ll find this post in your _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.