Just playing around with Jekyll and github pages. I’ve started many blogs in the past and never really followed through, and I suspect this will be the same!

A few notes on first experiences with Jekyll. It seems relatively easy to setup. The entire setup can be described succinctly, and so many of the pages I found wasted a lot of words trying to “make it simple” by making it a lot harder than it has to be. Basically, it boils down to:

create a github repo named $user.github.io and clone it to $dir

$ gem install jekyll
$ jekyll new $dir
$ cd $dir && git add . && git commit -a -m 'New page' && git push

When I actually did it, I did:

cd $dir; jekyll new blog; mv blog/* .

and then selected files to commit, but the above is basically all there is to it. When I first edited _config.yml, I made a syntax error (used ‘-‘ as twitter feed, fixed by changing to ‘none’) and github threw a build error which I didn’t notice for awhile. Initially, the site served by github just reverted back to the most recent green build, and I didn’t notice the issue until I went to commits and saw some failures.

To create a new post, add a new markdown in _posts following the convention that the name be _posts/YYYY-MM-DD-the-title-of-the-post.markdown.

View the changes locally with:

$ cd $dir && bundle exec jekyll serve

And you’re off and running with a brand new blog that you can ignore for months at a time!