Hey everyone! I’m glad you are here. After quite some time I finally made myself to write something. Today I would like to show you how I have created this blog in just a few hours (2/3 to be precise).

What powers this blog?

Some time ago I’ve heard about Jekyll – blog-aware, static site generator powered by Ruby. I decided to use it because we aren’t rich yet (Yet! ) and we can’t afford web hosting so we are using GitHub’s Pages that are really easy to setup with Jekyll. All you have to do is make a commit! You don’t have to use any sophisticated way to commit only build folder as GitHub does it all for us (I believe it builds Jekyll on its own).

So is it any good?

Definitely! Especially for a front-end dev that doesn’t really enjoy PHP. Creating this page involved almost no coding (actually CSS only but I had already written in while creating https://pigames.github.io) as you pretty much only use HTML and Liquid (template engine). Apart from this Jekyll has built in SASS compiler and creates a local server after typing jekyll serve into the console.

And how do you actually use it?

After setting up (How to do it?) and creating own template to create a post you simply create a markdown file with a Front Matter at the top where you specify attributes of your post (eg. title, date of creation, author, etc.) and then you simply write a post in markdown (actually it is kramdown but you can easily change it in _config.yml).

This section in code is looks like this:

---
layout: "post"
title: "How does the blog work?"
date: "2017-06-11 21:22"
author: "bibixx"
categories: "blog"
---

Hey everyone! I'm glad you are here. After quite some time I finally made myself to write something.

## What powers this blog?
Some time ago I've heard about [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com) – blog-aware, static site generator powered by Ruby. I decided to use it because we aren't rich yet (Yet! :wink:) and we can't afford web hosing so we are using GitHub's Pages that are really easy to setup with Jekyll. All you have to do is make a commit! You don't have to use any sophisticated way to commit only build folder as GitHub does it all for us (I believe it builds Jekyll on its own).

## So is it any good?
Definitely! Especially for a front-end dev that doesn't really enjoy PHP. Creating this page involved almost no coding (actually CSS only but I had already written in while creating <https://pigames.github.io>) as you pretty much only use HTML and [Liquid](https://github.com/Shopify/liquid/wiki) (template engine). Apart from this Jekyll has built in SASS compiler and creates a local server after typing `jekyll serve` into the console.

## And how do you actually use it?
After setting up ([How to do it?](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/quickstart/)) and creating own template to create a post you simply create a markdown file with a [Front Matter](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/frontmatter/) at the top where you specify attributes of your post (eg. title, date of creation, author, etc.) and then you simply write a post in markdown (actually it is [kramdown](https://kramdown.gettalong.org/) but you can easily change it in `_config.yml`).

This file pretty much looks like this:
```markdown
---
layout: "post"
title: "How does the blog work?"
date: "2017-06-11 21:22"
author: "bibixx"
categories: "blog"
---

...

## And how do you actually use it?
After setting up ([How to do it?](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/quickstart/)) and creating own template to create a post you simply create a markdown file with a [Front Matter](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/frontmatter/) at the top where you specify attributes of your post (eg. title, date of creation, author, etc.) and then you simply write a post in markdown (actually it is [kramdown](https://kramdown.gettalong.org/) but you can easily change it in `_config.yml`).

Have you added any additional features?

As it is pretty much a IT blog first thing I thought about was Emojis! Who doesn’t like emojis? For sure people that spend most of their time in the internet. So an easy solution to this was jemoji. After installing it you simply use it as you would for example on Slack – :wink: will show up as (unfortunately i couldn’t find a way to add skin color eg. for ).

Something else? Obviously code highlighting. I have used Prism. It offers a lot of languages, themes (we are using atom’s One Dark or something that kinda looks like it) as well as some plugins.

TL;DR

Jekyll is an awesome tool to quickly create static customisable blogs using markdown with a lot of potential and features. (And can have emojis!)