Progress with Jekyll


I've made a bit of progress hacking on this blog the last few nights... Posted by Thomas Sutton on January 13, 2010

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 Thomasguide 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.

This post was published on January 13, 2010 and last modified on January 26, 2024. It is tagged with: web, development, jekyll, meta.