My First Post

Prelude

So this is my first post on this site. I have hosted earlier in this domain but the way I did was unsustainable and flat-out boring: manually writing html pages and enchancing using copilot and then generating css from scratch. At that time I was naive and not confident enough to use site generator. I have also toyed with Wordpress but I didn’t like it because it was way too simple and I didn’t like its no-code low-code interface (That isn’t to say that I am against it).

I also heard about jekyll, even tried using it but its doc and tutorial are too short and not enough context is available for learning and using it as a noob.

What changed now?

I have become a competent. That’s certainly not it. Because I had tried just few months ago - I can’t suddenly become pro in span of months.

Actually, what changed is patience (aka butt in chair for long hours). I spent a lot of time reading others blog, stackoverflow and experimenting apart from reading official guides/docs; not to mention LLM chat. Some of things that I angered me is fact that I overlooked or somehow skipped critical piece of info from official docs. Anyways it works now.

Overview of my blog setup

There are few things that will help immensely with the setup.

Use jekyll-compose

Append following to gemfile:

gem 'jekyll-compose', group: [:jekyll_plugins]

Then execute following in the root of site directory:

bundle3.1

Add following to config.

# The base URL of your site
baseurl: ""

# jekyll-compose settings
jekyll_compose:
  default_front_matter:
    drafts:
      description:
      image:
      category:
      tags:
      author:
    posts:
      description:
      image:
      category:
      tags:
      author:
      published: false
      sitemap: false
    pages:
      author: 

This will automatically populate front matter whenever you run the command ` bundle3.1 exec jekyll post “My First Post”` with following:

---
layout: post
title: My First Post
date: {current time}
description: 
image:
category: 
tags: 
author: 
published: false
sitemap: false
---

I have few more tips but I have to sleep. Maybe I will describe in later post.

Au Revoir