This is a basic post in the _posts directory. I set up this Jekyll blog more or less following the instructions at the Jekyll docs and Jekyll Boostrap, but am keeping it in a separate folder on my file system and manually pushing the _site directory into my website. I use jekyll serve to preview posts before moving them.

New posts in the _posts directory follow the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.markdown and include the necessary front matter.

This is admittedly an awkward way to set up a blog, but it’s what I am doing for now, for several reasons:

  • I get to own the whole blog. It’s hosted on GitHub pages, so I get the whole file system duplicated on my computer and my GitHub account.
  • No databases. It’s just a static site, which I like. It makes it feel simpler.
  • I like figuring out how to make it work. Yeah, I could just spin up a WordPress or Squarespace site, but I’m more motivated to work on my website when I get to write all the code and understand how everything works.

In the future I would like to figure out how to make Jekyll work in such a way that I can actually control the URL structure when I integrate the Jekyll site with my pre-existing static site, and simplify some of the crazy things I’m doing to integrate it.