The Definitive Guide to Jekyll

Jekyll’s a publishing platform (sort of like Tumblr) I’ve been playing around with the past few days that’s apparently simple, and feels lightweight. As a matter of fact, it does feel lightweight, writing themes for it couldn’t be easy enough, and publishing articles with Jekyll is ridiculously fun. However, it’s not as simple as it is to get it set up:

1. Download and install Xcode
2. Within Xcode, download & install the command line utilities.
3. Open up Terminal, and download & install RVM.
4. Then install Homebrew.
5. In Terminal, enter brew install jekyll.
6. While that’s happening, create a folder with an index.html and another file called: _config.yml.
7. If it’s finished installing, make Terminal cd into that folder.
8. You’re almost done: create a theme from scratch, or pick a pre-built (half-done) theme.
9. Enter jekyll --server --auto to ‘run’ your server and go to http://localhost:4000 to preview it.
10. Configure Jekyll so that you can upload it to a web server.
11. Finally, you’re done.

I tried to simplify it as much as I could. It’s a pain to get it all set up (especially when I’m not particularly interested to dabble within Terminal) however once it’s up it becomes thrilling to write and publish posts.

Quick review of Jekyll: It’s all too fiddly for me, however writing and publishing feels much easier. Jekyll’s great for the knowledgable web developer, but not for me; I’m sticking to the one and only, Tumblr.