Blog-awareness

Abstract

We have talked about a lot of concepts pertaining to Jekyll in the previous chapters, but all of them were presented in an isolated manner. In this chapter, we go through a simple Jekyll theme to learn how those ideas come together to create a static web site. A very in-depth overview of the code used in the theme along with helpful comments to understand that code are provided here. Our discussion is focused on blog-awareness, which is also the central theme of this chapter. This is the idea that Jekyll has built-in support for features that are needed in a blog such as permalinks, categories, pages, and custom layouts. In addition, these simple features can be further customized and configured in a number of ways to support new ideas. Being blog-aware makes it easier to add new features to Jekyll and inherit the same rules or layouts that apply to the rest of your blog. New pages or posts can be added seamlessly and they still follow the same fundamental rules and conventions. We show how a theme takes advantage of blog-awareness and more important, how this property makes Jekyll themes modular. This modularity, along with the theme configuration, allows for us to reycle working code and reuse it in different parts of a project. We spend the majority of our time in this chapter talking about how to download a Jekyll theme, how to extract it, and how to get ready to start editing. Finally, we methodically go through each file in a code editor and explain how the code works.