Publishing an Article

Sean Raven
29 December 2015

This article will describe how to author pages and blog posts. Posts are authored in Markdown, see references here. The site is compiled using Jekyll, with some help from Jekyll Bootstrap.

Blog posts are created in the _posts directory. To create categories, create a folder for the category and place the posts in the _posts subdirectory of the category directory. The filename must be DATE-TITLE.md (eg admin/_posts/2015-12-29-publishing-an-article.md). The file must begin with a YAML Front Matter block, even if it is empty. YAFM blocks are delimited by lines containing three dashes.

---
---

The file should have the following entries in the YAFM block:

---
layout: post
title: My Post
author:
    name: Your Name
    email: you@yoursite.example.com
    github: username
date: 2015-12-29 13:59:00 -08:00
description: ""
tags: []
---
{% include JB/setup %}
  • layout tells Jekyll which layout (in the _layouts directory) to use for this file. It must be either post or page.
  • title is used as the page title.
  • author is for info about the post author. It can have nested entries name, email, and github.
    • name is the Author’s name (required, or don’t create the author block).
    • email is the Author’s email address (optional, appears in newsfeeds).
    • github is the Author’s GitHub user name (optional, creates a link to your profile).
  • date is the date, time, and timezone of publication. Jekyll uses this to sort the posts.
  • description is the page description which appears on the newsfeed and other pages.
  • tags is an array of tags for the post

If you have installed Jekyll locally, you can create a new post using the rake command:

$ rake post title="Hello World"

This will create a file with the correctly formatted filename and YAFM block. Note that you must still add the author block.

You can also create pages using rake:

$ rake page name="about.md"

A page is an HTML or Markdown file (with YAFM block) that does not represent an “article”. Otherwise, a page is identical to a post except for the layout: post and lack of any category or tags entries in the YAFM block.

For more info, read the Jekyll Quick Start