Posts
Blogging is baked into Jekyll. You write blog posts as text files and Jekyll provides everything you need to turn it into a blog.
The Posts Folder
The _posts folder is where your blog posts live. You typically write posts
in Markdown, HTML is
also supported.
Creating Posts
To create a post, add a file to your _posts directory with 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. For example, the following are examples of valid post filenames:
2011-12-31-new-years-eve-is-awesome.md
2012-09-12-how-to-write-a-blog.md
All blog post files must begin with front matter which is typically used to set a layout or other meta data. For a simple example this can just be empty:
---
layout: post
title: "Welcome to Jekyll!"
---
# Welcome
**Hello world**, this is my first Jekyll blog post.
I hope you like it!
ProTip™: Link to other posts
Use the post_url
tag to link to other posts without having to worry about the URLs
breaking when the site permalink style changes.
Be aware of character sets
Content processors can modify certain characters to make them look nicer.
For example, the smart extension in Redcarpet converts standard,
ASCII quotation characters to curly, Unicode ones. In order for the browser
to display those characters properly, define the charset meta value by
including <meta charset="utf-8"> in the
<head> of your layout.
Including images and resources
At some point, you’ll want to include images, downloads, or other
digital assets along with your text content. One common solution is to create
a folder in the root of the project directory called something like assets,
into which any images, files or other resources are placed. Then, from within
any post, they can be linked to using the site’s root as the path for the asset
to include. The best way to do this depends on the way your site’s (sub)domain
and path are configured, but here are some simple examples in Markdown:
Including an image asset in a post:
... which is shown in the screenshot below:
Linking to a PDF for readers to download:
... you can [get the PDF](/assets/mydoc.pdf) directly.
Displaying an index of posts
Creating an index of posts on another page should be easy thanks to Liquid and its tags. Here’s a simple example of how to create a list of links to your blog posts:
<ul>
{% for post in site.posts %}
<li>
<a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
You have full control over how (and where) you display your posts, and how you structure your site. You should read more about how templates work with Jekyll if you want to know more.
Note that the post variable only exists inside the for loop above. If
you wish to access the currently-rendering page/posts’s variables (the
variables of the post/page that has the for loop in it), use the page
variable instead.
Categories and Tags
Jekyll has first class support for categories and tags in blog posts. The difference between categories and tags is a category can be part of the URL for a post whereas a tag cannot.
To use these, first set your categories and tags in front matter:
---
layout: post
title: A Trip
categories: [blog, travel]
tags: [hot, summer]
---
Jekyll makes the categories available to us at site.categories. Iterating over
site.categories on a page gives us another array with two items, the first
item is the name of the category and the second item is an array of posts in that
category.
{% for category in site.categories %}
<h3>{{ category[0] }}</h3>
<ul>
{% for post in category[1] %}
<li><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endfor %}
For tags it’s exactly the same except the variable is site.tags.
Post excerpts
You can access a snippet of a posts’s content by using excerpt variable on a
post. By default this is the first paragraph of content in the post, however it
can be customized by setting a excerpt_separator variable in front matter or
_config.yml.
---
excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
---
Excerpt with multiple paragraphs
Here's another paragraph in the excerpt.
<!--more-->
Out-of-excerpt
Here’s an example of outputting a list of blog posts with an excerpt:
<ul>
{% for post in site.posts %}
<li>
<a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
{{ post.excerpt }}
</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
Drafts
Drafts are posts without a date in the filename. They’re posts you’re still
working on and don’t want to publish yet. To get up and running with drafts,
create a _drafts folder in your site’s root and create your first draft:
.
├── _drafts
│ └── a-draft-post.md
...
To preview your site with drafts, run jekyll serve or jekyll build
with the --drafts switch. Each will be assigned the value modification time
of the draft file for its date, and thus you will see currently edited drafts
as the latest posts.