How to Create Post Draft In Jekyll

In the previous post, we have shown you how to install Jekyll and publish your first post with it. If you have followed it, you can see that creating a post is a breeze; we simply create a new Markdown file, save it within the /_posts folder, and it will show up in the blog immediately.

That, however, could be a problem if you have put your blog online. Your post may have unfinished sentences, contain errors, and a few other things that should not be seen by your readers.

That’s why we usually create a draft first before pressing the Publish button. So, in this post, we will show you how to create a post draft in Jekyll before it hits the public eye.

Recommended Reading: How To Create A Blog With Jekyll – A Beginner’s Guide

But first, let’s start up the Jekyll server with the following command line.

jekyll server --watch

File and Directory

Prior to version 1.0, working with a draft in Jekyll is hardly manageable. There are numerous ways to deal with it.

Some have set published: false in the post files to prevent it from being published, and some put future: false in the configuration file to prevent Jekyll from generating posts with a future date — which still will be published once the date rolls around.

Now, Jekyll has made things simpler to control.

Jekyll relies on strict directory structure. In the case of creating drafts, we need to create a new folder named _drafts. We put all drafts into this folder.

The draft file name does not have to include the post date; we can just name it this way:

Jekyll will ignore this folder. You can write your post as usual, and it won’t be displayed out in the open yet. Once you are done with your post, you can put it in the _posts folder, and add a proper date in the filename.

Hold on?!

Hold on, can’t we just create any folder? Well, the _drafts folder name is the official naming convention to put your drafts in. We technically can name the folder anything, but doing so would prevent us from previewing our drafts.

In Jekyll, we can run the jekyll command with the --drafts flag to preview the drafts: jekyll server --watch --drafts Refresh your blog, and you will see the draft appear on the blog. The draft will be displayed with its latest modified date.

Conclusion

We have shown you how to create a draft in Jekyll. It’s quite simple. But we can make the workflow from draft to publication more streamlined with the help of a plugin. We will discuss it in the next post. So, stay tuned.

View the Original article

How to Create a Blog with Jekyll – A Beginner’s Guide

WordPress, which humbly started as a blogging platform, has now transformed into a full-fledged and a very popular CMS. With WordPress, you can build (almost) any kind of website, from a portfolio to an e-Commerce website.

But what if you only concern about blogging, and you do not need jam-packed features in WordPress like custom taxonomy, user management, comment moderation, and a nice media uploader?

In short, you just want to be focusing on writing and publishing your content. If that is something you have in mind, let’s meet Jekyll, a static blogging engine.

Recommended ReadingHow To Create A Github Page For Your Project

About Jekyll

Jekyll comes with the idea of creating a static (same old HTML) blog, one which is easily maintainable. In comparison to a dynamic blogging tool, like WordPress that is built with a server-side language like PHP, a static website has 2 key advantages.

First, it serves and perform faster. Second, it consumes less web resources namely memory and database I/O. Additionally, if you use Jekyll, you can host your blog in Github Pages for free.

Install Jekyll

First, let’s install Jekyll in our system. Launch Terminal and type the following command line:

sudo gem install jekyll

Once installed, run this command to ensure that jekyll command is functioning.

jekyll -v

The command should show the Jekyll version, like so:

Create a Jekyll Site

To create a new blog with Jekyll, type jekyll followed by new and the name of the site in Terminal. For example:

jekyll new jekyll-blog

In this example, it created a new directory as specified, jekyll-blog, as well as the following stuff within:

Type this command below to activate Jekyll server.

jekyll serve

You can also run the the server using the --watch flag; that way it will automatically update the blog everytime we made a change.

Go to the browser and type http://localhost:4000, or as shown in the Terminal screen to open the blog.

The Document Structure

Jekyll applies a specific document structure that we have to follow, so the blog could function properly. Let’s take a look at what we have in our blog directory below:

|-- _config.yml|-- _layouts|-- _posts|-- _site|-- css`-- index.html

First, we have _config.yml; it is the the blog’s configuration file written in Yaml. In this file we can specify the blog name, the permalink format, host, Port number, and etc.

_layouts is where we put customized layout for page or post.

_posts is the directory where we save all our posts. All the posts should be written either with Markdown or Textile. They will be compiled and save the output in _site directory; this is the directory where Jekyll will serve the posts in the Browser.

Lastly, we have css and index.html.

For now, we will leave them as they are, with no custom configuration. Let’s start writing our first post.

Writing a New Post

As mentioned above, in Jekyll, we either write the post in Markdown or Textile. We have covered in the previous on how to write with Markdown; you may want to check that link first before going any further.

Naming Convention

To create a post, we also create a new file that must follow this naming convention year-month-date-{post-slug}.{file-extension}, for example: 2014-03-11-hello-world.md. Save the file in _posts directory.

Post Front-matter

Before we begin writing the body content of our post, we must first define the post front-matter namely the title and the post layout. We can also define the post categories and the tags, but these are optional. The most important thing is that the front-matter must be set within triple-dashed line. Here is an example:

---layout: posttitle: Hello World!---

Then we can write the content:

Hello world! Welcome to Jekyll. This is your first post.

Save the file. We will see the psot generated, and appear on our blog. Nice!

Wrap up

In this post, we have shown you how to install Jekyll and write your new post, which are the basic things that I think you ought to get to know before going further with Jekyll. There are a lot more things to explore in Jekyll, and we will discuss them in future posts. Stay tuned.

View the Original article