Learning Jekyll requirements - jekyll

I wanted to learn Jekyll mainly for designing websites and blogs.
What are the necessary required skills that I should have before I can start digging into Jekyll/
Thank you in advance.

Today I learned Jekyll. It's pretty straigt forward!
The minimum prerequisites are knowledge of HTML and CSS. Nice to have but not required before you start is some knowledge about Liquid Jekyll's templating engine.
I used Jekyll's own tutorial, that David already pointed out and read through the first few pages. Then I got hands on with it by following the quick start instructions from their homepage:
gem install jekyll
jekyll new my-awesome-site
cd my-awesome-site
jekyll serve
# => Now browse to http://localhost:4000
Installing it on my Mac worked fine with the pre installed Ruby and its packagemanager RubyGems on my Mac OS X 10.9. I already installed node.js and it's packagemanager npm before, but i haven't seen where it's needed but maybe somewhere under the hood.
From here I inspected the demo package, read a bit in the docs and googled my way through till I had a working site build by Jekyll.
Have fun!
P.S. For the posts and sites I refreshed my knowledge about the markdown syntax.

Well except html, css and javascript, you just have to learn Jekyll itself it's really easy.
Go for it !

Related

I would like to develop a jekyll gem plugin, but I don't know how to start

I don't find tutorials to develop and publish jekyll plugins or to extend jekyll functionalities.
Here is Jekyll's documentation on how to get started with Jekyll plugins https://jekyllrb.com/docs/plugins/

How important Ruby background is for using Jekyll?

I am working on choosing and adopting a static site generator.
My understanding is that Jekyll is the most popular one. I learned that Jekyll is based on Ruby language.
I do not have any experience with Ruby and it is not on my Career path. I am very much a .NET and C# developer.
Do I need to know Ruby in order to use Jekyll efficiently? Or should I compromise and adopt a less popular static site generator that is based on .NET platform?
Update after having good answers here and some research
I think we have good response and answers here. Thank you #2583rk and #deveth0
However, I am discouraged by the fact that Jekyll disregards Windows and does not provide official support for it. Windows is quite a popular desktop OS and ignoring it does not look good for a tool that usually (and practically) runs on a "non-server" or desktop environment (It does generates files run on servers though)
I am going to give Pretzel a try as it has all the benefits of Jekyll plus more.
There is no need for Ruby understanding. Most task just require a basic or deeper knowledge of markdown and liquid, but both are easy to learn.
Only if you want to build plugins, you'll need Ruby.
I switched my blog over to Jekyll earlier this year with no background in Ruby and, for the most part, it hasn't been a problem. Jekyll is a simple and straightforward solution with some good documentation; you can find a lot of examples online on how to setup it up properly and use plugins without knowing too much about Ruby.
I've been using Jekyll on a Windows laptop without any issues. There's a separate set of instructions for getting it up and running on Windows here. You need to install a package manager called Chocolatey, then install ruby using choco install ruby -y and then you can install Jekyll using gem install jekyll. There's some more detailed information on the link for specific things like encoding, auto-generation, etc.
Jekyll works fine on Windows. Half my doc team is using Jekyll with Windows. Here's a tutorial on installing Jekyll on Windows.

Can't get github hosting to work with Jekyll 3.0.0

I am new to both Jekyll and github. I have followed the instructions here to get a blog on github using Jekyll. When I type jekyll serve from my local directory I get
D:/projects/gitblog/MyName.github.com/jekyll-bootstrap/_plugins/debug.rb:13:in `<module:Jekyll>': cannot load such file -- jekyll/post (LoadError)
Can someone help me with this? Based on some thing I have read, this might be a problem with the latest version of Jekyll, which I am using,
Try deleting the file _plugins/debug.rb and run the server again.

Issue with SASS/CSS for Foundation 5 using Compass

I'm having a problem with Foundation 5's recommended SASS installation.
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/sass.html
I followed the brief tutorial only a week or so ago and had no problems. Everything seemed to run OK and looked OK.
Over the course of the next few days I was making amendments to the project I am working on but only put the changes (CSS) into a custom.css file. I was wanting to ensure my client was happy with my proposed design before getting into the guts of SASS.
This evening I came to make the changes to SASS. I ran compass watch before I made any changes and I was immediately met with:
write stylesheets/app.css
This totally screwed up my index.html despite not having made any changes. The app.css file is only a fraction of the original size (~750 lines vs. ~8,500) and as a result the page is pretty much loading as raw HTML with no useful CSS - there's not even a hint of any styling on body for example.
After deciding to re-install from scratch I'm still no better off and running into very much the same issue.
According to Foundation:
app.scss
Here you can determine what stylings will be in your project.
By default all of Foundation is imported, but you can deactivate and
select specific components you want to import or add your custom Sass
here.
When I first installed Foundation, it was all imported as the default styles loaded for my index.html. It was acting how Zurb described it would. Now it only seems to grab some default styles but not the whole thing and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
Update: A friend cloned my repo and had no issues whatsoever. I've done the same and ran into the same issue again - must be something to do with my environment.
Further update: compass watch is only compiling two of the Foundation files, _icon-bar.scss and _visibility.scss. It seems to be pulling completely arbitrary lines even within those files, so something in them is not right either. It does not pull anything from anywhere else. There's a couple of pastebin links in the comments on the answer below.
I would greatly appreciate any assistance with this.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
I'm just learning Foundation 5 with Sass but your issue and the CSS output is looking how mine was compiling out as well, with lot's of comments and no CSS being pulled into the HTML..
This thread on the Foundation Forums really helped me. Seems like the latest Sass and Compass wasn't working properly?? Not sure the details but the suggestion from Szabesz to uninstall the latest Sass and Compass and install slightly older ones worked:
to uninstall:
sudo gem uninstall compass 1.0.0
sudo gem uninstall sass 3.4.0
to reinstall old versions:
sudo gem install sass --version 3.2.9
sudo gem install compass --version 0.12.7
What's in app.scss what ever is listed in there will be output as css in app.css.
#import "settings"
#import "foundation"
Is the default.

How to install a jekyll plugin for an octopress blog?

I have recently found excellent Octopress & Jekyll frameworks, and I am going
to switch my homepage to octopress from wordpress (which is rather well documented).
However, I am eager to add several plugins to octopress. For example, the one that
generates bibliographies. There are several plugins for Jekyll for doing this
(for example, https://github.com/inukshuk/jekyll-scholar)
However, I was not able to make it functional for an octopress website;
I tried to follow the install instructions, and instead of jekyll plugin directory
use the octopress plugin directory; it did not work out.
Can anyone provide me with general instructions how the jekyll plugin should be installed for a simple octopress blog (an example for jekyll-scholar would be enough).
Not 100% sure, as I'm new to Octopress and Jekyll myself but here goes:
Install
$ [sudo] gem install jekyll-scholar
Usage
Create a file called ext.rb in the plugins directory of Octopress.
The contents of the ext.rb file should be
require 'jekyll/scholar'
To adjust the Jekyll-Scholar settings, use the configuration file _config.yml