What is Jekyll?

Jekyll is a gem that facilitates the generation of static blog sites. GitHub Pages supports Jekyll, which allows developers to quickly create impressive blog sites for free!

What is GitHub Pages?

GitHub Pages allows each developer with a GitHub account to create a static web site hosted from their GitHub repository.

Okay enough definitions, how do I get started?

To start off, type $ gem install jekyll in your terminal to install Jekyll.

Next, type $ jekyll new your-site-name to create a new Jekyll site. Jekyll will create a directory with the name you have given, and fill it with files and folders that follow Jekyll’s directory structure.

You can use $ cd your-site-name to change directories in to your site’s directory.

Once you are in your project folder, you can type $ jekyll serve to launch your server on http://localhost:4000.

For more information on setting up Jekyll visit Jekyll.

To get started with GitHub Pages, go to GitHub Pages.

Writing blog posts

Jekyll’s main purpose is to take text written in Markdown, or even plain HTML, and run it through layout files that transforms the way it looks on a web page. This makes writing sites with Jekyll very quick and easy.

If you are unfamiliar with Markdown, this is a great resource: Markdown Cheatsheet.

To make a new post, create a new file under the _posts folder, with the naming convention YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.markdown. Next, include the YAML Front Matter at the top of the file:

---
layout: post
title:  "title"
date:   YEAR-MONTH-DAY HOUR:MINUTE:SECOND -TIMEZONE
categories: RELEVANT CATEGORIES
---

Next, start blogging! To see what your blog post will look like, visit http://localhost:4000 after you have launched your local server.

That sums up the basics of creating a blog with Jekyll! Check back soon for an update on how to add a portfolio to your Jekyll blog site.