Hello World
Over the years I have been setting up many weblogs and CMS sites for people. When WordPress came out and everyone was migrating to it, I also created a blog for myself. I did so with Drupal and few other platforms, but none of those weblogs survived beyond couple of posts. You see the pattern here; the focus has been on technology rather than the content. Some days ago, I got interested in Jekyll and decided to give it a go after many years of no web development. Meanwhile I started writing some notes about typesetting in TeX for a colleague, which looked like a good material for publishing. Seeing a promotion from GoDaddy for $2 domain registration completed the picture. I registered “randomdoctor.com” and started yet another blog. Hopefully this one will last for a while :) I wrote a short biography of myself that you may read, or continue with the following notes about setting up the blog.
Blog Setup
I used GitHub to host the blog. GitHub Pages is magical in its automatic building of Jekyll websites. I followed the instructions given in this well written blog post. Afterwards, I installed Jekyll on my MacBook, and started experimenting with it locally. All in all, I liked this exercise very much :). Here are some notes regarding my experience.
- The use of MarkDown language for technology/science blogging is awesome. I enjoy its easy and nice typesetting for text, code, and math formulas.
- Jekyll is many times better than WordPress if you want a simple weblog. It is minimal; The workflow is sophisticated; and you have great control over everything.
- Despite being quick to setup, it is highly customizable and extendible through plugins.
- DNS setup was not very smooth, but I finally managed to read this guide and configure the apex for “randomdoctor.com”.
- Jekyll works like a charm when installed on local machine. You run
bundle exec jekyll serve
; and afterwards every change that you make instantly appears in the browser. This is very helpful while styling a website. - I did some styling, including changing colors, fonts, and a bit of the template. I summarize some steps that may work as examples for the next amateur :)
- I started with the default theme
midnight
. The gem package for this is namedjekyll-theme-midnight
, which can be modified in/Gemfile
. - Configuration begins with
/_config.yml
file. Other than usual setup, I added few plugins underplugins:
section, includingjekyll-email-protect
. This requires adding the gem packagejekyll-email-protect
to/Gemfile
. - You define the colors such as
$bgcolor
in/_sass/_variables.scss
and apply them in/style.scss
. - I used Adobe Fonts (Typekit) to create font-face css file for serif font Adobe Caslon. I also downloaded the sans-serif font Linux Biolinum into
/fonts
folder and put its font-face css file there. These two css files are imported in/_sass/_variables.scss
, and variables such as$body-font
are defined there. You may indeed modify the use of those font variables in/style.scss
if needed. - I added date tag for posts in the index page. Open
/index.html
and add {{ post.date | date: “%B %e, %Y” }}
inside a new div block<div class="date">
under the title line. I also moved the same tag in_layouts/post.html
from bottom to the top.
- I started with the default theme