how to jekyll

holding back the puns hnnnggg

basic directories

The basic idea with Jekyll is that you should be able to do almost everything with Markdown and SCSS, and have all of the HTML just pop into being, including meta, dates, slugs, and all the other accoutrements. So you only need to care about a few directories for daily use.

Those are:

• _drafts: For when you want to work and store but not reveal yet
• _posts: Where you do the dated content
• _sass: Where you put the fancy stylings

There is also some basic info in files in the root directory, namely:

• _config.yml: The most general site configuration.
• index.html: The landing page.

finessing

The way Jekyll converts everything to HTML is through templating, using a domain-specific language called Liquid. It's vaguely bash-like, but much more sensible. If you think of it as some ifs and some fors and some composable incantations like uppercase | split | do_something_else, you'll be just fine with it. Liquid goes inside HTML and will be filled in with things when the site is generated.

This stuff goes on in two specific folders:

• _layouts: Liquid/HTML partials that are referenced in the YAML of every post in the top (the "YAML front matter"). So if you choose layout: post, the content gets put inside the post layout.
• _includes: These are partial snippets that are intended to be smaller and more general than specific layouts. The idea is that you can include them using a Liquid directive and build up your layouts with them.

themes

I am informed by Jekyll and co. that themes now normally have their own _layouts, _includes, and _sass folders. So you'll need to make those to override those settings with your own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯