This is #1 in a planned series of mini-posts learning Jekyll

Jekyll is like Wordpress stripped of all its strengths and weaknesses and a non-existent user interface. It is a static site generator meaning a website running on Jekyll generally spit out only simple HTML codes. And, simple means speediness.

Be warned, Jekyll is not for everyone. It has quite a learning curve if you are just starting to code but not impossible. When I first found out about Jekyll I knew it was something awesome but I couldn’t get my head wrapped around it and quickly moved on to something else more interesting at the time. I’ve only come back to Jekyll now that I have a good understanding of how Ruby works and somewhat proficient in basic programming concepts.

Learn more:

• What is Static Site Generator?
• So what is Jekyll exactly?

My goal is to document my learnings as I discover new and interesting things to do with Jekyll in particularly with Front Matter and Liquid.

In the meantime, here are some resources to get you started on Jekyll:

• Check out Jekyll’s quick-start guide.
• Make a static site with Jekyll
• JONATHAN MCGLONE’s Creating and Hosting a Personal Site on GitHub

I got started on my Jekyll website from coding along with Jonathan McGlone’s guide. While it was great to get Jekyll setup quickly, now it is time to go back and break it all down and learn from doing from scratch. I’ve stripped the CSS to focus on Jekyll’s Front Matter and Liquid at the code level. I can’t wait to add the CSS back but I feel this is part of the growing pain to learn from one things to another.

My current go-to resource to experiment with Front Matter and Liquid:

• Jekyll Cast

So now my website seems to be reverting to it infant state in aesthetics.

Before:

insert screen capture of css website

Now:

insert screen capture of non-css website

And the journey begins…