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Part 4 - Post Creation

This part of the tutorial explores creation of blog posts for the poole-master website.

Post Creation Basics

Jekyll does not offer native GUI text editors, however, post creation is simple and automated via the _post directory, which contains text-files representing posts.

A post must follow the required naming convention of yyyy-mm-dd-title.md, which creates a Markdown file and ensures Jekyll will correctly order the posts by date (dependent on theme logic).

The post can contain YAML front-matter (i.e., YAML between a pair of --- at the top of the file), which provides settings for the post (e.g., layout and title). YAML front-matter can then be followed by the post’s content structure and styled via Markdown syntax.

E.g., a simple example post would contain the following contents:

---
layout: post
title: The Post Title
---

Some text with *italic* and **bold** styling.

The Markdown Language

Markdown enables consistent structuring and styling of content with a minimal amount of simple syntax enabling a writer to focus on content creation rather than its design.

Common Markdown syntax includes:

  • Headings, where a larger number of # results in a smaller heading with # being the largest and ###### being the smallest:
      # h1
      ## h2
      ### h3
    
  • Italic and Bold:
      *italic* and **bold**
    
  • Links:
      [link text](link)
    
  • Images:
      ![image alt text](img link)
    
  • etc.

The above syntax guidance is based on (Pritchard 2017)1 where further details on Markdown syntax can be acquired.

References

  1. Pritchard, A. (2017). Markdown Cheatsheet. [online] Available at: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet [Accessed 1st Jan. 2019].