Recently, I read about a few Drupal blogs migrating over to Jekyll — acko.net and Development Seed. The concept seems nice as you will be writing the content in files instead of a database so I thought I would give it a try. With this, I am able to write blog posts using Vim. Also, on my current blog, I am using Markdown as my input filter for writing blog posts.

Installation & Configuration

Installing Jekyll was easy as I had only to follow these instructions. Did the following steps to install it:

$ sudo apt-get install rubygems
$ sudo gem install jekyll
$ sudo apt-get install python-pygments
$ export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin

For the path, I added it after on my .bashrc. I then created a directory structure based on this. I have also added the directories css, images and fonts that would store media files. And for my _config.yml file, I have this:

baseurl: /
name: dsdeiz.github.com
pygments: true

Setup

The current setup of my Jekyll site has 2 categories namely blog and gallery. The blog category would contain the actual blog posts as the gallery would contain images. The variables used for YAML Front Matter for my blog post only contain the basic ones:

  • layout (value is post always)
  • title
  • category

For my gallery post, I have this format:

{% highlight yaml %}