I write this post to share to people starting a blog on Jekyll how to set it up. I was scrolling around the web and could not find out an easy setup Jekyll. I will try to do it here.

1- installation of Jekyll on your computer

You need firstly to install on your computer the gem Jekyll for mac gem install jekyll bundler for linux sudo gem install jekyll bundler

To be able to display it on github.io or also called github pages you need to call your folder the same as your github user. For instance for me I create a folder jodyvanden. Otherwise Github pages will not work.

There are two ways of creating a blog with Jekyll.

First is you have not repository and you can use the bundler gem jekyll to do that
jekyll new <PATH>
Or you already have a repo and want to install it inside
jekyll new . --force

The jekyll install a bunch of files in this repo. Open with you prefere txt reader and you will need to first open ./_config.yml
change the title, description, your email,your twitter and your github account

To be able to display your blog on your github pages, you will need to add to your Gemfile:

source "https://rubygems.org"
gem 'github-pages', group: :jekyll_plugins

2- write your first post

I am sure you saw that there is a folder _posts
just jump in and check out the first file in there. You will understand that a blog post is easy and is divided in two

the first part in between the --- contains the title, the type of the article post the date and the categories in which this post will be registered

So to add new post, I would suggest to copy the previous post in _posts and modify it so that you don’t have to start from scratch. The convention for the title fo the post file is YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext.

3- Some Jekyll tricks

One your first blogpost I am sure you will want to find out how to do some cool tricks:

the snipped

to be able to write down some short code in a snipped like this simply write it down `like this`

the ruby snipped

to be able to write down more code from ruby like this:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Simply write it in between { % highlight ruby %} and { % endhighlight ruby %}(without space after the curly bracket)

{ % highlight ruby %} (without space after the curly bracket)
def print_hi(name)
puts “Hi, #{name}”
end
print_hi(‘Tom’)
#=> prints ‘Hi, Tom’ to STDOUT.
{ % endhighlight %} (without space after the curly bracket)

Titles

I am sure you want to write down in between titles to help your text to be structured
for example you can write down in between <h1>title</h1>
until <h6>title</h6>

URL Links

To be able to write down your prefered links there is nothing easier. It works like a constant that you define at the bottom of the blog post.
for instance if I want you to check out the [Jekyll docs][jekyll-docs] for more info I simply write down [Jekyll docs][jekyll-docs]
the first one will be the text file which will be displayed and the second will be the constant at the bottom which looks like this [jekyll-docs]: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/home

hope this helps some people to start their blog on the Githubpages

PS: You can also find First Jekyll cheat sheet or another Second Jekyll cheat sheet where most of the commands are put together.