Getting Started with Jekyll Academic

Required Software

In order to edit your Jekyll Academic website you will need the following pieces of software:

1) A text editor. Any text editor will do, our favorite is Atom

2) GitHub Desktop. This is used to sync files between your local computer and the GitHub repository that is acting as your website host.

Quickstart Guide

This quickstart guide is geared to getting you up and running quickly. Following the directions below will result in you having a Jekyll Academic website hosted on GitHub pages live on the web. Before you begin working through the quickstart guide you may want to familiarize yourself with the following technologies that will be used to create your Jekyll Academic website:

1) Register for a GitHub Account

Skip this step if you have already setup your GitHub account

2) Setting Up your Jekyll Academic Repository:

3) Connect your GitHub Repository to GitHub Desktop

4) Update Website _config.yml File and Sync Changes

Important Files and Folders

In order to better understand how everything in your site works, there are a few files and folders that you need to be aware of. These files control the main elements of your site, including your logo, bio photo and navigation. Full documentation of the directory structure can be found here.

Adding Blog posts

To add a new blog post to your site you simply create a new Markdown file. Jekyll requires that you follow the yyyy-mm-dd-title.md naming convention. Once you have the blank Markdown file you will need to add the header information so that Jekyll knows it is a blog file. Add the following to the top of your Markdown file: --- layout: post title: Add Your Title Here excerpt: "Add an excerpt here, the excerpt will appear underneath the blog title" modified: 2016-01-13 20:41:38 tags: [intro, beginner, jekyll, tutorial] comments: true category: blog --- # Start your content here The important thing to note is that you need to make sure that the category is set to 'blog'. This ensures that this post will appear on the blog page. You can then add your blog content using Markdown as your markup language for the rest of the file.

Adding Presentations

In Jekyll Academic presentations are actually set up as posts, just with a few different settings in the header. This means that your presentation files live in the same _posts folder as your blog posts. The only differences between presentations and posts is the layout and category section in the header.

Adding Reveal.js Presentations

To add a Reveal.js presentation to your site you first will need to create a new Markdown file in your _posts folder. At the top of your new file you will want to add the following header. Notice that you need to set the layout to 'slide' and the category to 'presentation'

  ---
  layout: slide
  title: Add Your Title Here
  excerpt: "Add an excerpt here, the excerpt will appear underneath the blog title"
  modified: 2016-01-13 20:41:38
  tags: [intro, beginner, jekyll, tutorial]
  comments: true
  category: presentation
  ---
  <section data-markdown>
  # Add reveal.js slide content here, following the reveal.js format
  </section>

Linking to External Presentations

To add a presentation post that appears on the presentation page, but is not a reveal.js slide deck you follow similar instructions as above. You will create a new Markdown file in your _posts folder and add the following header to it. Notice that you keep 'post' as the layout and 'presentation' as the category. This will create a blog post style post where you can link to external presentations.

  ---
  layout: post
  title: Add Your Title Here
  excerpt: "Add an excerpt here, the excerpt will appear underneath the blog title"
  modified: 2016-01-13 20:41:38
  tags: [intro, beginner, jekyll, tutorial]
  comments: true
  category: presentation
  ---