Baby Steps

It’s been ages since I wanted to get hold of a blog. Not blogpost or Wordpress or any of those things. I wanted something under my own control. I’ve found it! This is it! No crappy ads or loss of control. I can make the blog however shitty/sparkly I want, without anyone’s permission. Thanks internet! #2muchOptimism So here’s a bird’s eye view on how it’s done. That is, to setup a barebones structure for a website and have it running on a local server. Github is a great place to host the blog (it’s free!) and show the world what you know (what do you know, really?). Well, there are important things to nail, now that the foundation has been laid. Markdown, more jekyll, more themes and more, you know, writing. I guess this will be a good start. Maybe, the next post would be an actual tutorial (instead of the just a youtube link) to get a blog running on github, barebones style.

This will be it for the blog post! I’ll just leave the default text hanging around.

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.

To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes 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.