For the past week or so, I've been experimenting with Web development on GitHub Pages, a free hosting service provided by GitHub. The system is powered by Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby that has powerful features for organizing information. Jekyll makes use of Liquid templating logic and the Markdown text to HTML converter to provide a solid platform for creating static Web sites that mirror some of the features provided by popular content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal.
There are a number of excellent resources available for getting started with GitHub Pages and Jekyll, including the documentation linked from the previous paragraph. After reading up on the basics, I learned the most from the source code of published Jekyll sites. Browsing through the directory structure and files is probably the best way to understand how HTML, CSS, and YAML front matter interact with Liquid in a Jekyll site.
I am especially interested in how YAML metadata and Liquid logic combine to organize and display information in meaningful ways; this is the reason folks typically turn to a CMS to manage their online content. After much trial and error, I cobbled together a simple blog that makes use of tags to group content.
There are a number of excellent resources available for getting started with GitHub Pages and Jekyll, including the documentation linked from the previous paragraph. After reading up on the basics, I learned the most from the source code of published Jekyll sites. Browsing through the directory structure and files is probably the best way to understand how HTML, CSS, and YAML front matter interact with Liquid in a Jekyll site.
I am especially interested in how YAML metadata and Liquid logic combine to organize and display information in meaningful ways; this is the reason folks typically turn to a CMS to manage their online content. After much trial and error, I cobbled together a simple blog that makes use of tags to group content.