As is tradition.

Each time I've started a blog, and there have been a couple, I've opted for more of a 'traditional' platform. I've used wordpress, both the self hosted / deploy method, and the pre-built 'one-click deploy' solutions. I've used Blogger. I've used ghost.io. I've probably used another long forgotten platform, of which there are plenty.

All of these had a fairly similar premise: A browser based word editor within an 'Admin' portal, followed with a corresponding 'user' website to navigate each of the posts. They stored each of the posts and comments within a database - which makes sense as posts want to be created / edited & persisted - but it could possibly be a little too much. If the site is only going to be serving up the same content to each user why do we need it to be in a database? Conversley we don't want to be writing a static html page and handling all of the links etc manually.

I must admit, I had never given it too much any thought before now - it is just the way it is.

That was until I came across Jekyll.

With Jekyll all of the posts are written in markdown, they are then transpiled to static HTML which are in turn served up to the site visitor. No need for a database. No need for any fancy comments. No need for the kitchen sink. Just a simple blogging platform.

Structure

All posts are written within the _posts folder with the format YYYY-MM-DD-post-name.markdown which, when transpiled, end up within the _site folder. As this cheeky image below shows;

The top of each post needs to contain some meta-data which gives Jekyll some information needed for the home page.

---
layout: post
title:  "Hello, World!"
date:   2018-11-22 22:13:00 +0000
categories: jekyll update
---

With a markdown post written, simply running a one line command within... command, will transpile the markdown into HTML and serve it up on http://localhost:4000

bundle exec jekyll serve

We have our blog!

"Markdown content goes in. HTML webpages come out."

Me - 2018

Whats next?

This started as a simple "Hello, World!" and has evolved into a bit of a fly-by overview / explanation of Jekyll itself. No bother. We have a bit of insight into writing posts and ending up with the nice formatted post which is fundamentally what you want from a blogging platform.

The rest of the Owl

Other than the knowledge of starting with the user input of markdown and ending up with the Jekyll output of html we don't really know much. What about the rest?

Watch this space! In a subsequent blog post I'm planning on digging into what Jekyll is doing to get from markdown to html. What is Jekyll doing, so we don't have to?