a collection of notes and observations from and aide-memoires for using Jekyll for the first time.

Posts

• Generating ‘in the style of’ texts

  riffing on the simple site search, re-using the data for auto-generate of pseudo-stories.

• Simple Site Search in Jekyll

  a hack which is not terribly efficient, and would not scale to large posts or to a large collection of posts, but is pleasingly Jekyll-y, albeit needing a smidge of javascript.

• Handling multiple authors in Jekyll

  is quite simple, but requires a few handlebars

• An experiment with parallax scrolling in Jekyll posts

  A brief experiment with how to add a simple view within a scrolling Jekyll collection post onto a fixed image ‘behind’ it.

• Creating previous and next links within a Jekyll Collection

  If you use Collections in Jekyll, you lose some of the default plumbing that ‘just works’ for normal posts etc. One such piece of plumbing is the idea of the previous and next posts within a collection.

• Creating an RSS feed for a single Jekyll Collection

  look up the collection via the page param and don’t forget about the spurious newlines

• Creating an RSS feed to combine all Jekyll Collections

  look up the site.documents, filter by posts, then prefix the collection title

• Sort order of Jekyll Collections

  add a sequence attribute to each collection and sort by that

• Accessing Jekyll Collection details from a post

  somewhat clumsy idiom to locate collection object via name

• Using Jekyll Collections

  Using Jekyll Collections allows for rich structures, but means re-building a bunch of what would have been default functionality for vanilla posts and pages.

Aide-memoires

Look up source files for layouts from default theme

• bundle show minima
  • where theme: minima is specified in _config.yml
• via https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/
• can concatenate lists
• Attribute List Definitions
• if not -> unless

markdown spec

• https://kramdown.gettalong.org/syntax.html

{% assign fruits = "apples, oranges, peaches, tomatoes" | split: ", " %}  
{% assign vegetables = "broccoli, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes" | split: ", " %}  
{% assign plants = fruits | concat: vegetables %}

Issues

silent fails, e.g.

• misspelling a category name in _config.yml so it doesn’t agree with the folder name
• for some reason, can’t make this work

    {% assign posts = site.documents | where_exp:"item", 'item.layout == "post" or item.layout == "story_post"' | sort: 'date' | reverse %}