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This is my first post on Jekyll!

I was actually supprised by how easy it was to get started. I’m using the Jekyll packaged though Fedora along with the Minima theme. Using the Fedora package is a little different than what is typically recommended but it seems to make everything easier.

Before we begin, I should back up and explain Jekyll. Jekyll is what is called a static site generator. What that means is that you build your site in a friendly easy to use language like markdown and then when you are ready you tell Jekyll to build a HTML site from the resulting markdown. The HTML site then can be deployed to a web server to be served to the internet as a plain HTML site. In a way, Jekyll is like a compiler. The content you create in markdown is a lot like source code and the resulting site is like a binary.

install

To start, create a new environment with distrobox.

distrobox create jekyllenv --image fedora:latest

Next, enter it and install dependencies

distrobox enter jekyllenv
sudo dnf update 
sudo dnf install rubygem-jekyll rubygem-minima

We now have Jekyll installed

To create a new site run

jekyll new supercoolsite

Basic configuration

I would then start by configuring the _config.yml file. You can open it in your favorite text editor.

For information about configuring the Minima theme click here: https://github.com/jekyll/minima/tree/2.5-stable

The _config.yml file is where you set global information such as site title, description, and socials

Addtionally, You can add headers to your site like so:

header_pages:
  - stuff.md
  - about.md

Do note that .md and .markdown are equivalent files in Jekyll

creating pages

To create a page, simply create a file endeding in .md or .markdown inside the root of your site. For the page to show up it must have the proper header like the one below:

---
layout: post
title:  "Links"

---

Addtionally, directorys and assets are supported. For my site I created an assets directory in the root of my site that contains all my images. When adding images to your site I would strongly encourage that you convert the image to webp with ImageMagik since it will make your site a lot faster.

Writing posts

Posts live under the _posts directory have specical formating just like any Jekyll page. Each file name takes the form year-month-day-page-title.md so make sure you name your posts correctly.

Addtionally, each post file needs a header like the one below.

---
layout: post
title:  "I've switched to Jekyll and you can too"
date:   2026-04-25
categories: jekyll
published: true
---

When creating new posts be sure to follow the correct format.

Deploying

If you just want to test our your site locally, you can run:

jekyll serve

To actually deploy Jekyll run:

jekyll build

Your site will be generated and put in the _site directory. This then can be copied to a web server for deployment with a tool like rsync.