Working environment for static websites

This blog introduces Jekyll for building static websites for blogs, portfolios, articles, photos etc. Jekyll takes textfiles written in markdown and converts them to web-pages. One great advantage with Jekyll is that GitHub supports free hosting of Jekyll pages. This in essence means that you can build a website and host it for free using Jekyll and deploying on GitHub.

Jekyll Pages, Posts and Collections

In Jekyll, the organisation of published documents included in a site can use one of three scopes: pages, posts and collections. The basic scope behind pages, posts and collections are:

• pages: for single documents not part of any blog, series or other compilation, but that can be the portal for any such compilation,
• posts: a compilation of associated texts where the temporal sequence (date) is regarded (i.e. blog), and
• collections: a compilation of associated texts without temporal sequence.

In this blog I have used all three scopes and at the same time tried to make it into a manual for how to setup and publish a website using Jekyll.

Jekyll is written in the programming language Ruby. Ruby is an open source language were bits and pieces (“packages”) are written and published as “gems”. How to setup Ruby and its gems is overhauled in the Ruby collection. How to create different layouts and contents for web sites using Jekyll is the topic of the Introduction Pages and the Jekyll Posts.

Jekyll themes

The community engaged in developing Ruby Gems for Jekyll is extensive and active. This means that there are many gems available for converting markdown text files to web-pages. There are hundreds of different Jekyll themes to choose from - each generate a different layout from the same basic text (with some additional tweaks required). Many of the themes are Open Source, but there are also themes that comes with a fee.

GitHub officially supports about a dozen or so theme, but you can deploy any theme on GitHub - you might just have to tweak it a bit extra.

The site Best Jekyll Themes has collected about 200 of the most popular Jekyll themes. Other galleries with Jekyll themes include:

• GitHub.com #jekyll-theme repos
• jamstackthemes.dev
• jekyllthemes.org
• jekyllthemes.io
• jekyll-themes.com

Karttur’s Jekyll setup

This blog is about setting up Karttur’s website using Jekyll and the theme Minimal Mistakes by Michael Rose. The blog also covers some tricks and tips and how to customise a theme.

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