How I built this blog in a day

I built this blog using Jekyll, A quick and simple way to generate static websites from markdown and hosted on GitHub pages.

Install Jekyll via Ruby, RubyGems on a MAC OS. I cloned Hyde, a two-column theme for Jekyll.

Install and get running Jekyll in the Terminal. Use the following commands

$ gem install jekyll 
$ jekyll new my-blog
$ cd my-blog
/my-blog $ jekyll serve
Now browse to http://localhost:4000

Jekyll provides the base directory format and you can see there are a pile of folders created. _layout folder contains the template files for pages and posts. _includes folder contains the code that is included in the templates. public folder contains the basic style files and CSS for the themes.

Your posts are in the markdown format in _posts folder. A markdown file should be properly named in the format of YYYY-MM-DD-PostTitle.md and should have a header with items like layout, title author, categories, img etc.

Pages can be created in the root directory or sub directories. Do not start the page name with an underscore. Properly format the header with layout and title of the page.

My blog displays recent posts with the title, date, a short description and a Read More link that links to the actual post. I added this line of code to achieve the look.

I hope this gives an idea of how to get started with Jekyll.

Here are some resources that can be useful.
Jekyll
Jekyll Bootstrap