This Blog Post Would help you understand the flow of Construction of this blog and let you teach you things need to write your first blog in “gang-press”

How did we do it !

The whole blog was constructed with a two open source components:

  • Jekyll - This is a static site generator. Which we have used to construct our blog.

  • Type Theme - This is a jekyll Template which we have used as a base to construct our blog

Directory Structure of the blog

The most important thing to understand in publishing a post in Jekyll based blog is understanding the directory structure of the code. Here is the directory structure for Jekyll

Jekyll_directory_structure

  • _includes - This folder holds the components which would be reused again and again in posts page and also index page. Eg. header.html, footer.html.

  • _layouts - This folder has all the HTML elements which control the layouts of the blog. This folder would have files like default.html, page.html and post.html.

  • _posts - This is the main folder which would have all of the posts in markdown with a specific naming convention. All posts should be named as “ YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-the-blog.md “.

  • _sass - This has all the style components all grouped under _includes, _layouts and _posts.

  • css - This has a main style file which imports all the style components from _sass.

How to publish a blog post

Its very easy to create a blog post, Just create a markdown file and place it in “_posts” with a specific name. jekyll will take care of the rest. Here are the step by step instructions of doing the above with suitable references.

  1. Create the blog post in MarkDown

  2. name the blog posts in this format “ YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-the-blog.md “.

  3. Place the blog post in _posts directory of the repository and before placing, follow these steps

  • Clone the repository 
git clone https://github.com/wethegang/gang-press.git
  • Now move the markdown file to _posts directory of the repo
mv YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-the-blog.md gang-press/_posts/
  • Add the repository to the code
git add YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-the-blog.md
  • commit the repositary, pull and push the repository
git commit -m "<message>"
git pull
git push

Preview your blog

Previewing is a bit difficult, because you need to have jekyll installed locally. Here are the instructions to set your environment as soon as possible and start blogging.

  • follow these instructions for installation of jekyll (Instructions)

  • Clone the repository 

git clone https://github.com/wethegang/gang-press.git
  • Go to the root of the repository and use jekyll to construct a local copy of the blog and host it in the local server
cd gang-press
jekyll serve
  • Open the browser and connect to local host
google-chrome
http://localhost:4000/gang-press/

This should allow to see the preview. Keep writing new blogs and Happy blogging.