I started this new incarnation of Passing Curiosity with stock Jekyll, the content imported imported from my old Wordpress blog, and Mark Reid’s excellent Creative Commons licenced design.
I pared it back from Mark’s more complex use case and reworked the templates and stylesheets a bit to make them more HTML5-y, but there’s still a way to go. Eventually, I’d like to use the new semantic tags throughout and make the design my own.
I tweaked the 404 page to (naïvely) extract the words from bad URLs and
pre-fill the Google search box. Still on the search engines theme I also added
an XML Sitemap template – which lists the index, archive, and every
post – and a robots.txt which references it.
Following Benjamin Thomas’ guide I now use a custom jekyll
command which loads extension code when processing the site (without having to
fork Jekyll itself). At the moment, this is just loading Jack Moffitt’s
html_truncatewords filter.
The new filter is used in the index, archives, and Atom feed templates and the
<meta> tags to generate a description when a post does not have an excerpt.
I plan on extending the set of meta-data included in each page to include as
much of the Dublin Core Element Set as makes sense. Some of it
will come from the site and post YAML data, but others will need custom Liquid
tags to determine the correct values automatically.
In all, it’s been a busy couple of evenings but Jekyll is refreshingly simply and delightfully easy to start hacking with.