Blogging with jekyll

Posted on August 1, 2014  •  2 minutes  • 366 words

I started using jekyll with Github Pages few years back but Github Pages didn’t allow plugins at the time and I do want to hack a bit around jekyll for my needs so I gradually move to self-hosting. As for static blog doesn’t require much resource, I opted for the lowest package on RamNode which goes for $15 a year (a bit over a buck a month for a 128MB RAM VPS). This is actually plenty for my needs.

Install jekyll

Install rvm or rbenv. If you already have one, skip this, then install jekyll

curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby=2.0.0
gem install jekyll

Create your new blog and git init it.

jekyll new example.org
cd example.org
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
jekyll serve --watch

Deploy

I create a script on my repo post-receive. Upon receive my push commit, the script will rebuild the site from source, output it to nginx public folder /usr/share/nginx/html/example.org and purge varnish cache afterword. Purging varnish cache is optional but I do change my CSS/JS occationally now and then so I put it there as well.

You can do this by following this tutorial on DigitalOcean - “How To Deploy Jekyll Blogs with Git” . It’s pretty easy to follow. Use your copy-paste-fu.

Note: If you’re using Ubuntu 14.04 or later, you will have to do to apt-get install nodejs as well. jekyll itself doesn’t depend on nodejs but execjs does.

Others

I wrote a bunch of posts about jekyll as well. Check these out if they interest you.

• BetterTube - A jekyll plugin for embedding YouTube videos

• Static assets combine with jekyll

• Speed up jekyll site generation with rsync

• Setup custom error page for jekyll on nginx

• Create a contact form with jekyll

• How to group posts by month in Jekyll archive page

• Link Post in Jekyll

• Optimizing the hell out of your site for PageSpeed (relevant)

• Using AngularJS with jekyll

• Using GitHub issue tracker as comment system for jekyll

• A better sitemap for jekyll

• Localization with jekyll

• Post scheduling with jekyll

• Monthly/yearly post archive generator for jekyll

Happy blogging. Don’t forget to share your cool jekyll hack on your new hippy blog.