More tips I learned about Jekyll

For the sake of taking notes, here’s what I learned about Jekyll recently

1. You should manually create the _drafts folder. I thought that would be created by default but according to the docs you create it yourself.

   To get up and running with drafts, create a _drafts folder in your site’s root and create your first draft

2. The _layouts, _includes and _sass directories are not in my site root when I set up my first site, and that’s because since v 3.2 they are stored in the theme-gem by default. I am running ubuntu and when I run bundle info --path minima from the root of my site, I am pointed to a directory: /var/lib/gems/3.0.0/gems/minima-2.5.1. This is where these directories are by default.
3. I think you are supposed to create (or copy) the _layouts directory into your site’s root if it is not there. It says to do this in the docs.

   Create the _layouts directory in your site’s root folder and… In any case, I have copied the _layouts directory from /var/lib/gems/3.0.0/gems/minima-2.5.1 into my site’s root.

Still to do

1. I would still like to change my theme from minima (the default) to something else. I want to minimize the time I spend worrying about visual formatting, HTML, CSS, anything like that. I like the look of the theme called “Clean Blog” which, for reference, is here.

2. After picking a theme I would like to customize it and then never need to touch it again.

3. I would like to add tags to articles, as well as categories.

4. I would like to re-order the categories when you click on the Categories page. Currently they are ordered by age, so my oldest post’s category is listed first. I think I’d like to order by number of posts within that category.

5. I would like the categories page to show a few (perhaps 3) blogs for each category, but then link to a list of all posts within that category.

6. I still need to learn how to use the {{ post.excerpt }} feature within Jekyll, and then go back and add these to my posts.