Building the Blog (02): Say Hello World

Continuing ...

This post is the second part of the Building the Blog series which focuses on setting up the environment and andding the basic page as well as making the whole blog run up with the power of Jekyll.

Set up the environment

Jekyll is a ruby program, which means ruby is required for Jekyll. As Jekyll’s official document recommended, the supported OS for it including Linux, Unix, Max OS X and Windows is not officially supported. Even though, installing ruby, RubyGems and other requirements on Windows has some convinent solution, there still will have some unexpected problems that occur in some specific scenarion owing to the disagreement between operating systems.

I use Linux Mint as my main software environment. The following codes or commands without additional comments have been tested on that platform. To be more specific, what I use by default is Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon Edition in this series posts.

First, if you don\’t have Ruby and RubyGems installed on your environment, you can use following commands to install them:

sudo apt-get install ruby

Afterwards, you should install the core, Jekyll itself via RubyGems.

sudo gem install jekyll

I think it’s time to test whether all is well. To create a new site scaffold in a specific path, the new subcommand of jekyll is well to go. Just use the following commands:

# use directory ~/new-jekyll for example
cd ~
jekyll new new-jekyll
cd new-jekyll
ls -al

As showed in your terminal, the all of the basic components have been set up for you as a start point for your future awesome site. To have a peek of it, just run the serve subcommand of jekyll:

# use serve subcommand to start a local server.
# use s or server is valid as well.
jekyll serve

Now, open your broswer and visit http://localhost:4000/. Congratulations! I think you have seen what the site looks like.

However, good luck may play hide & seek with you sometimes. If you couldn’t see the site in your broswer, please check whether the port 4000 has been used by another application. A quick solution for this problem is specifying another port for jekyll to serve pages. Use the --port ${PORT} switch of jekyll command to alternate it.

PORT=12345
jekyll serve --port ${PORT}

Say Hello World

Next, say “Hello World” as convensions. There is no doubt that the posts are the center of the site. In Jekyll, all your post should be placed in a special directory named _posts. Since we started based on a scaffold, this directory is existed and has a sample post in it. Add a new (or replace the original) plain text file with a name following the convension of yyyy-mm-dd-your-post-name.md (yyyy-mm-dd is the date of the blog post of which the year month day are seperated by dashes, your-blog-post-name is the name of the post in which the spaces should be replaced with dashes, the file extension md just indicates the file as a markdown file , if you like some other wide-accepted extensions such as markdown are also alternations). Then open it with your prefered text editor and type in some text (“Hello World” is definately a good choice at this moment). Save it and open your site in your broswer. (If you pressed Ctrl+C and terminated Jekyll server, just run it again). Is the new post listed in the index page?