How to Jekyll and GitHub Pages - knowledge base

June 16, 2022 1 minute read

Resources - GitHub web development

I came across several resources while creating this blog. List will be updated accordingly.

Intellij Idea config for Jekyll blogging and markdown use: Pavel Makhov blog
- how to create post file template in IntelliJ Idea (tested, works)
Official GitHub manual: Schnellstart, Anfang und Fortshritt
Quick cheet sheet on markdown, also nice Minimal Mistakes theme

Simplistic theme

This website is using the base Jekyll theme - Minima (at least so far). Basic docs and customizing tips at jekyllrb.com

Minima source code can be found at GitHub: jekyll / minima

Same for Jekyll framework: jekyll / jekyll

Blogging tips

Each post should be placed in _posts directory. Re-build the site to see your changes. To rebuild, run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file. After that, include the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.

Update: Minimal Mistakes theme tricks

Great source of Minimal Mistakes tricks: Katerina Bosko page

How to change font size of post titles (whole headers) on the main page:

Navigate to _archive.scss
Add font-size to .archive__item, e.g.:

.archive__item {
  position: relative;
  font-size: 0.8em;