First steps with Jekyll

Writting a blog post should be straighforward. Setup Jekyll and Jekyll admin in Ubuntu in 5 minutes.

Setting up Jekyll is quite easy, but to have a full pleasant experience it is required to find a good tool to edit your page.

The first thing to do is to create a Hello World Jekyll site. There are many different ways to install Jekyll, but I found this quite easy. It took me 5 minutes. The only thing you need to do is to fork jekyll-now with the name ${your_github_username}.github.io

Modify the _config.yml file including your name and your job role.

In around 10 minutes github will process your repository and the site would be available at ${your_github_username}.github.io

Then I started looking into Jekyll editors to make the blog posting more user friendly. I googled it, and in this webpage I found a good way to start:

https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-editors

I tried a few options before setting up the Jekyll Admin:

  • Sublime + Jekyll plugin: installing the sublime plugin in linux was a bit tedious and after installing it, my initial experience was not so user friendly.
  • WebStorm: after installing it I realized it was one month trial. And I couldn’t find an activation code…

I realized that the Jekyll Admin was the most popular option.

These are the steps I had to do to use the Jekyll Admin plugin in my new blog:

  1. Install the latest Ruby version: sudo apt-get install ruby2.4 sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/ruby2.4 /usr/bin/ruby sudo apt-get install ruby2.4-dev
  2. Install latest version of jekyll: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/upgrading/3-to-4/
  3. Add a GemFile in the root folder of your blog repository: 
    gem 'jekyll-admin', group: :jekyll_plugins
gem 'jekyll-sitemap'
gem 'jekyll-feed'
  4. Install the ruby bundle: 
     bundle install
  5. Start the Jekyll localhost server: 
    bundle exec jekyll serve
  6. Administrate your page from your browser as a CMS: 
    http://localhost:4000/admin/