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Blogging with Jekyll - Basics

How did I set up the basics of my blog?

Of course there are endless very good posts out there about Markdown + Jekyll + GitHub Pages and I am not going to repeat what others already have nicely documented. So let me just summarize my setup and referring to others for more detailed explanations.

Theme

I wanted a simple and “content focused” theme with a sidebar where I could refer to other resources. I finally decided for Lanyon which is pretty much what I would consider as a “plainionistic” design :)

Excerpts

I think having excerpts of the most recent posts on the start page of the blog provides a nice overview to the visitor. So I changed the index.html from


{{ post.content }}

to


{{ post.excerpt }}

Discussions

And what is a blog without the option to leave comments? Disqus seems to be the state of the art solution so I created an include


{% if site.disqus %}
<div class="comments">
	<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
	<script type="text/JavaScript">

	    var disqus_shortname = '{{ site.disqus }}';

	    (function() {
	        var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/JavaScript'; dsq.async = true;
	        dsq.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js';
	        (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq);
	    })();

	</script>
	<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript>
</div>
{% endif %}

And added it to the post layout


{% include disqus.html %}

That’s it! My basic - plainionistic - setup is done ;-)

Tags: jekyll  blogging