Jekyll Starter: Scaffold a blog in seconds with Yeoman

Since there were a few requests to re-use my blog as a template, I decided to create a bootstrap based on my blog, called Jekyll Starter. I’ve also created a Yeoman based generator to easily scaffold a Jekyll based blog and generate new post templates within it.

If you are new to Jekyll, you can read my earlier posts on why I chose Jekyll as a blogging platform, how to set-up a blog with Jekyll and Github Pages Part 1 and Part 2.

What is Jekyll Starter?

Jekyll Starter is a bootstrap project for quickly creating a blog site based on Jekyll. The starter project provides a foundation based on Lanyon, which is a flavor of Poole.

In addition to the clean, minimalistic styling borrowed from Lanyon, Jekyll Starter provides the following functionality out-of-the-box:

• Comments using Disqus
• Google Analytics Integration with superProxy
  • Page view counter
  • Website counter
• Social sharing using AddThis
• Author following using AddThis
• Tag visualization per post
• Archive organized by tags
• Customizable profile picture in sidebar and about page
• Grunt based build with CSS merge and minification

This is the base on which anandmanisankar.com is built.

Usage

Pre-requisites (Optional)

You will need a Disqus account, AddThis account and Google Analytics Tracking ID, if you want to integrate your blog with these services. Ensure you have enabled share and follow tools in AddThis. To make use of the Google Analytics integration, ensure you set-up and configure the Google Analytics Super Proxy as described here. Also ensure that your super proxy returns ‘ga:pageviews’ and ‘ga:pagePath’. (To tackle the CORS issue with super proxy, refer to my StackOverflow response)

Option 1:

Use the Jekyll Starter Yeoman generator to scaffold your blog in a matter of seconds.

To install generator-jekyllstarter from npm, run:

npm install -g generator-jekyllstarter

Now, initiate the generator:

yo jekyllstarter

Answer the questions asked by the generator, and you’re blog is ready!

You can also generate a new post:

yo jekyllstarter:newpost

Option 2:

Fork the Jekyll Starter github repository and manually alter _config.yml based on your requirements.

What is Yeoman?

Trick question. It’s not a thing. It’s this guy:

Basically, he wears a top hat, lives in your computer, and waits for you to tell him what kind of application you wish to create.

Not every new computer comes with a Yeoman pre-installed. He lives in the npm package repository. You only have to ask for him once, then he packs up and moves into your hard drive.

npm install -g yo

Bugs / Feature Requests

You can report issues or request new features here.

Contribution

You can find the Jekyll Starter repository on Github. Feel free to send a pull request.