Creating Blogs with Jekyll

Vikram Dhillon

Jun 2016 · Apress

About this ebook

Learn to create your own blog using the Jekyll static site generator. You’ll start with a simple template, add new features to it, automate any maintenance, attach social sharing, and begin writing. By the end of Creating Blogs with Jekyll, you will be able to create custom blogs with Jekyll, update the content with ease, and reach out to your readers with minimal effort. Because you've built your blog yourself, you'll know exactly how each component works, and you won’t be dependent on an admin panel to maintain it.

Creating Blogs with Jekyll equips you with the knowledge to create an elegantly designed blog and scale it to capture more readers. Recapture the magic of writing by creating great content and use an easy workflow in Jekyll to maintain it for blogging. Do new things and write about them in style with Jekyll.

• Takes you through building a fully functional blog from scratch using Jekyll
• Provides a fun way to work on a side-project and integrate cutting edge web technologies
• Teaches you how to update and maintain your awesome blog

Jekyll is a simple, secure and very low maintenance blog engine that converts naturally written content in markdown into a beautiful and minimal blog. It allows you to focus on content creation and expressing yourself instead of spending all your time updating the plugins and maintaining the database. Jekyll does not rely on a database as a backend so your blog will be far more secure and reliable than any traditional blogging engines such as WordPress.

We live in a day and age where short attention spans make it very difficult to expose a reader to interesting content. What better way to capture a reader's attention and retain viewers by captivating them by your own unique style and taste? Jekyll allows the content to shine with minimal distractions and a greater focus on the content and easy sharing of the content.

What You'll Learn

Choose a base theme appropriate for your style and development
• Integrate various web technologies that will work well together and enhance your blog
• Automate social sharing components and comments workflow
• Make adjustments to themes, views and styles of blog posts
• Update any of the modular components of the blog and integrate new technologies
• Implement Jekyll and deploying static websites for future projects

Who This Book Is For
The developer who is ready to move beyond the complexities of maintaining a content management system by creating their own unique blog in their own style. It’s for the project manager tired of spending all their time editing their blog on the admin panel and updating the content management system. Creating Blogs with Jekyll is an excellent choice for new developers to start blogging because of the simplicity of Jekyll’s theming layer and writing workflow. It’s an excellent choice for the web developer wanting to build their blog from scratch and expand their knowledge of higher level web technologies.

About the author

Vikram Dhillon is currently a research fellow in the Institute of Simulation and Training, at University of Central Florida. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Central Florida, where his main focus was bioinformatics. He has published a few scientific papers on computational genomics. He has worked as a software and business development coach at the Blackstone Launchpad to mentor young entrepreneurs and startups through the process of building technology products. He was previously funded by the National Science Foundation through the Innovation Corps program to study customer discovery and apply it to commercialize high-risk startup ideas. He is a member of the Linux Foundation and stays very involved in open source projects and initiatives for the past several years. He often speaks at local conferences and meetups about programming, design, security and entrepreneurship. He currently lives in Orlando and writes a technology focused blog at opsbug.com.