Jekyll is fun
So, with some free holiday hours, I’ve found playing with Jekyll to be more fun than expected. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
I wanted to do one of two things: Either start competely from scratch with a bare-bones GitHub Pages blog repo, or fork from Barry Clark’s jekyll-now repo. I tried both.
With the bare-bones repo, with no prior knowledge of Jekyll at all, it was very straightforward how to get a page to be served, but not how to create a blog of many files, all in a time series.
While the forked repo strategy was extremely simple to get started, I did not find it to be tinker-friendly without any knowledge of Jekyll. I can’t keep away from tinkering at least a little bit with a theme.
Eventually, it became apparent to me I should just learn what Jekyll is doing, and it turns out there is a wonderful Step by Step tutorial on the Jekyll site. There are ten steps, but they are pretty simple, and they each explain the logic of the components of Jekyll. I followed the tutorial on Windows, and pretty much ended up with a complete (albeit unstyled) site, running locally. Grab some existing CSS from a few blogs, and a tiny bit of tinkering later I have something a little closer to what I want.