I have been using Jekyll on this blog for a little while now and I love it (and you should use it too!). It’s so easy to use and is pretty quick to set up.
In this guide I will show you how to get started with Jekyll and even produce your own blog like mine in a few minutes.
Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby. It takes plain text files, runs it through a renderer and produces a publishable static website. The advantage of Jekyll is that it separates the website’s content from its form and allows you to use templates and permalinks to generate your site.
Jekyll has several advantages:
1) You can use Markdown or Textile for writing your posts, which is great for writers as all they need to do is write the content in plain text format. They don’t have to worry about HTML or Javascript when writing content.
2) It is easy to setup and requires minimal maintenance.
3) It is free of clutter and distractions, allowing readers to focus on the content.
4) It comes with built-in support for syntax highlighting of code snippets using Pygments (or other highlighters).
5) Jekyll also has support for multi-lingual sites using i18n plugins.
Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, runs it through Markdown (or Textile) and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website suitable for serving with your favorite web server. Jekyll also happens to be the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use Jekyll to host your project’s page, blog, or website from GitHub’s servers for free.
Jekyll is an open source project released under the MIT license, meaning that it’s completely free for anyone to use. You can find the source code on GitHub.
Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator written in Ruby by GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. Jekyll uses the Liquid templating language to process pages. Liquid is also used in GitHub Pages to provide additional functionality and dynamic content.
The syntax highlight tag is a great way to display code snippets on your website. It can automatically detect the language and applies syntax highlighting with Pygments. Where possible, use the more specific tags, such as css, html or javascript.
This tag accepts text, markdown or html content. If you want to include HTML elements within your code block, you need to escape the angle brackets with < and > symbols respectively.
For example:
This tag accepts text, markdown or html content. If you want to include HTML elements within your code block, you need to escape the angle brackets with < and > symbols respectively.
There are a lot of ways to use Jekyll, but you don’t need to be intimidated. This guide will walk you through the entire process of setting up a blog using Jekyll.
Step 1: Download and Install Jekyll
First, we need to install Jekyll on your computer. Don’t worry, it’s easy. First, open your terminal and navigate to the directory where you want to store your website. Next, run the following command:
$ gem install jekyll
If all goes well, you should see something like this in your terminal:
Fetching: fast-stemmer-1.0.2.gem (100%)
Successfully installed fast-stemmer-1.0.2
Fetching: kramdown-1.6.0.gem (100%)
Successfully installed kramdown-1.6.0
Fetching: liquid-2.6.1.gem (100%)
Successfully installed liquid-2.6.1
Fetching: mercenary-0.3.5.gem (100%)
Successfully installed mercenary-0.3.5
Fetching: safe_yaml-1.0.
Jekyll is a static site generator. It takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.
Jekyll does not try to outsmart users by making bold assumptions, nor does it burden them with needless complexity and configuration. Put simply, Jekyll gets out of your way and allows you to concentrate on what truly matters: your content.
Jekyll is lovingly maintained by the core team of volunteers.
One of the biggest pains of creating a personal blog is setting up a publishing toolchain. You need to get your text into something that can render it nicely, then you need to host it somewhere, and then you need to remember to actually update the thing. And none of that is especially interesting or fun. The Jekyll platform on GitHub Pages solves all of these problems in one go by allowing you to write and render your site using Markdown and Liquid templates, publish it using Git, and host it for free.
If you’re looking for a good way to start blogging about code, this post will walk you through the process of getting Jekyll set up on your local machine, writing your first posts, publishing them online, and customizing the design of your site so that it matches your personal style.
This guide assumes that you’re already familiar with basic Git workflow, but if you aren’t I would definitely recommend digging into some tutorials before proceeding. We’ll also be doing everything from the command line, so if you’re not comfortable with that you might want to wait until there’s a graphical user interface available (I hear one is coming soon).