Simple Jekyll Site

This is an example of a very basic Jekyll site. It lays down the basic folder structure, uses very basic CSS to make it look presentable and leaves everything else up to you.

This is a perfect starting point for building your own Jekyll site.

Requirements

Development time dependencies:

Ruby
Gems
Jekyll
Rdiscount (optional - comment out in _config.yaml to use Maroku)
Node.js & Grunt.js (optional - only if you wish to use GruntJS)

Run-time dependencies:

A web server (any will do)

Beginners Guide

To use this template:

Clone to some directory

Modify _config.yaml with your name, blog title, description and etc...
Tweak style.css and HTML files in _layouts to personalize
Create blog entries in _posts/ - work off the sample posts there
Run jekyll serve to generate site locally
View it by going to http://localhost:4000 and make sure it looks good
If all is well, upload contents of _site to your server
Repeat steps 4-7 to update blog

Features

Following features are available:

Automatically generate a valid RSS feed (see feed.xml in root directory).
Automatically generate a valid Google Sitemap (see sitemap.xml in root directory).
Organize your posts into categories and automatically generate category index pages.
Can be deployed in a subdirectory

Using Categories

To use the category feature simply add category tag at the top of your post:

category: some_category_name

You can specify multiple categories using a comma separated list.

Known Issues

The plugins in the _plugins directory are not compatible with Github pages. If you want to deploy your site to Github, you might need to give up on these plugins.

Deploying to Subdirectory

You can deploy to a subdirectory. For example instead of running your site at http://foo.tld/ you can instead put it in http://foo.tld/blog/. To do this use the url and baseurl settings in _config.yaml. The former is used for absolute links (like in the RSS feed) while the latter is used for relative links (like everywhere on the front page). For example if you set it to:

baseurl: /blog
url: http://foo.tld/blog

Then the html files will still be generated in _site but all the links will be generated either relative to /blog or using the absolute url of http://foo.tld/blog.

Note: when you run the built-in Jekyll server you will need to access your site by going to http://localhost:4000/blog.

Linting & Validation

You can use Grunt.js to automatically validate the HTML in your generated site. First install the dependencies:

npm install

You can use the following Grunt commands:

grunt jshint - to lint your scripts.js file using JSHint
grunt csslint - to lint your styles.css file
grunt validation - to validate all the HTML files in _site

Please note that validation is done against the W3C server. If you have many pages, you may get temporarily locked out for abuse.

To lint js and css simultaneously simply run grunt with no parameters. Validation is only on-demand because of the potential lockout.

Credits

This sample layout uses plugins created by Dave Perret to generate categories and sitemaps. Credit where credit is due. Please see the _plugins directory for details.

The web font icons have been created based on the Typicon set and customized via the Fontello service.