Jekyll Resources

One of my favorite things about Jekyll is how it gets out of the way and lets you, the designer, actually design. Jekyll imposes no type of structure or framework, no default classes, layout, or coding conventions. You’re free to structure and style your content as you see fit. As such how you plan and author your styles is entirely up to you. There are, however, a few things you want to keep in mind when writing CSS for a Jekyll site. Read more

YAML front matter is perhaps the most important aspect of creating sites through Jekyll. It allows you to control how Jekyll processes and builds pages, create page-specific variables, and triggers file processing. Let’s take a closer look at front matter and how it can help you create more efficient Jekyll sites. Read more

In Jekyll, content for pages and posts can be written in either HTML or Markdown. Although there will be times that HTML is the more appropriate choice, Markdown provides a more natural writing environment that makes blogging easier and less of a chore. In this post we’ll examine how Jekyll uses Markdown and cover some basic Markdown syntax. Read more

Jekyll uses the Liquid template language to control the logic of templates and assemble pages dynamically. To get the most out of Jekyll, and to build effective templates you need to understand the basics of how Liquid works. In this post we’ll cover the basics of Liquid syntax so that as you begin to author templates, you’ll have a greater understanding of Jekyll’s capabilities and how Liquid can help you build more powerful sites. Read more

One of the main reasons to use a static site generator like Jekyll is the automation it provides for repetitive tasks and page generation. In Jekyll many of those automations are driven by the configuration file _config.yml. In order to harness the true power of Jekyll it’s important to understand how this file works and what your options are when using it. Read more

To control Jekyll you’ll run a series of commands within your command-line interface. The Jekyll gem gives you the jekyll executable, which has several commands and options you can use to build and serve your site. Let’s explore these commands and their options: Read more

Once Jekyll is installed you can begin to explore its functionality. In this post we’ll take a closer look at Jekyll’s default boilerplate site and discuss how you can use it to learn more about Jekyll. Read more

Getting started with Jekyll is relatively simple, although perhaps not quite as simple as their documentation would have you believe. There are a number of dependencies and requirements you have to satisfy before installing and using Jekyll. Let’s explore those dependencies and talk about the process of getting started with Jekyll. Read more

Welcome to the companion site for the lynda.com course Jekyll for Web Designers. This course is designed to present Jekyll to web designers in a clear, concise way. In this post we’ll take a quick look at how Jekyll works, and whether it’s right for you. Read more