What is Jekyll?

A 60 second introduction

Jekyll is a static site generator built with Ruby. 

Documentation

Static vs. CMS

What does Static mean?

Jekyll vs. HTML + CSS

Sites built with Jekyll

Github Services

8th Light Blog

Healthcare.gov

(Don't blame Jekyll!)

I have a Jekyll site... now what?

YAML
Ain't A

Markup

Language

YAML Front Matter

Liquid Tags

layout: post
title: I Love My Cat
description: A post about my cat
related: ["My Eight Cats and I", "Kittens!!"]
categories: jellybeans, kittens

{{ page.title }}
# => I Love My Cat

{{ page.description }}
# => A post about my cat

{% for post in site.posts %}
   {% if page.related contains post.title %}
       # display post link
   {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Custom Post Types

We can use YAML and liquid tags to create custom post types.

Result:

Social Media Sharing

---
layout: post
title: "It's Jekyllicious!"
description: Tips and Tricks for Blogging with Jekyll
date: 2016-6-03
twitter_text: "It's Jekyllicious!!"
---

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text="{{ page.twitter_text }}
"%20{{ site.url }}{{ page.url }}%20via%20@{{ site.twitter_username }}

Other ideas:

Gems

Do i need a gemfile?

Gems can be included in a Gemfile or installed individually. If you have a lot of customizations, or want to make it easy for others to clone your site, definitely use a Gemfile. 

Popular Gems

3rd Party Plugins

Comments

Plugins like Disqus will allow visitors to comment on your posts. 

Documentation

Comment Forms

These comment form plugins provide a back-end to store form entries and notify you via email.

• Formspree
• FormKeep
• Simple Form

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a tracking code that can be integrated as an HTML file. 

Plugins that sound pretty cool

Design

Tricks for lazy designers

• Jekyll comes with a basic theme out of the box. 
• While I can't personally endorse any pre-made themes, there are multiple sites where designers can share their themes.
• When in doubt, use Materialize.

The bottom line...

CloudCannon or Octopress might help to make Jekyll more user-friendly for non-developers.