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Getting Started
/getting-started/
Adventures with Jekyll
2

Introduction

My interest in working with a Jekyll site came after attending a few workshops, where instructions had been set up through an insitutional repository and displays through the just-the-docs theme.

I wanted to launch a Jekyll site that:

  • brought together materials walking through my data analysis exploration (of which there are a variety of techniques)
  • it's a humbling experience to do something difficult and out of your comfort zone, when there's an easier option

Steps

1. Gather the Ingredients

Tools:

  • GitHub user account
  • Text Editor
  • Basic understanding of Command Line (Intro to Bash tutorial from Programming Historian)
  • Basic understanding of Markdown (Markdown Cheatsheet provides a great overview)

Dependencies: (in coding terms, this means when a piece of software relies on another one)

  • Homebrew
  • Ruby
  • Ruby Gems
  • Jekyll

2. Dependency Checks / Jekyll Install

Mike Dane, a developer and teacher, has created a series of Jekyll Tutorials, and these were invaluable for understanding how Jekyll works, how to create a Jekyll site and information around configuring content.

  • Check ruby version: ruby -v (2.5.0 or higher, as of September 2021 )
  • Check gem version: gem -v
  • Install the jekyll and bundler gems: gem install jekyll bundler
  • Check Jekyll version: jekyll -v

3. Create a New Jekyll Site

Followed instructions from Mike Dane's Tutorial: Creating a Site

  • Create a new Jekyll site: jekyll new myblog
  • Change into your new directory: cd myblog
  • Build the site and make it available on a local server: bundle exec jekyll serve
  • Open browser to view local version of you Jekyll site: http://localhost:4000

4. Jekyll Themes

There are a variety of themes available for Jekyll. This means that a theme can be applied to the site you've just created to change the way the information is visually structured and displayed.

The Jykell site offers a variety of resources to search for themes: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/.

I found this was a bit of a tricky step, especially when apply themes that hadn't had a lot of recent development. I decided to go with the just-the-docs theme, which is prevelant in many academic institutions for sharing tutorial based workshops.

Opening myblog folder using a text editor, navigate to the Gemfile (not the Gemfile.lock):

gem "just-the-docs"

Navigate to the _config.yml folder and add:

theme: just-the-docs

And then execute:

bundle

If you run into any issue, I also found you could install it via:

gem install just-the-docs