This is the first post in the Geocortex dev blog. This blog is hosted in GitHub Pages, and uses Jekyll as its templating engine. Write a markdown file and it is converted into a blog post automatically when committed to the repository.

The content below is the default post with instructions that is created when a new Jekyll site is built. It is helpful for understanding how to write new posts for this blog; just know though that you do not need to run Jekyll locally since GitHub will automatically convert the markdown pages on commit. Jekyll is useful if you want to preview your post before publishing.


You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.MARKUP

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and MARKUP is the file extension representing the format used in the file. After that, include the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.