Welcome to my new web dev blog!
Hello! This is the first post in my new blog. My intention for this blog is to create a place for me to document everything that I am learning as a new web developer.
I started my certificate program in September 2019, and I want to be able to look back on all I have learned, and have a centralized space for notes. Here I will make notes of the things I’m learning, the challenges I face, and how I solved any issues that arise. I came up with the idea when I created my first Jekyll blog for an assignment in my CMS class. I needed to create blog posts, so I decided to live-blog my experience using Jekyll. I ended up having a lot of fun with this, and I had notes for myself for the future.
Today’s blog will talk about the steps I took to do the initial set up for this blog.
To get started, I:
- navigated into old jekyll directory on my machine
- executed command jekyll new julia-blog
- cd julia-blog
- bundle exec jekyll serve
- navigated in browser to localhost:4000
This is pretty straight forward and you can find these instructions in the Jekyll docs.
Next I wanted to install I theme. In my blog from school, I wrote that I did this by:
- finding a theme and downloading the files from github
- copying over the files that I didn’t already have in my directory from creating the new blog
- bundle install
- bundle exec jekyll serve
(At this point I’d like to leave a note to self: ensure I categorize these posts into topics for easier navigation later)
When I did this, I got a page with the theme working. But I got the 404 page. Now I am looking in the config file to see if I can find out why. This config file came from my theme, which is Jasper 2. The baseurl was set to “/jasper2”, which doesn’t exist in my root folder, so I changed it to “/”, which the config file instructed you to do.
- jekyll serve
This gave me an error. The error message suggested the following (something to do with the gem file, I will look into this later), which I executed:
-bundle exec jekyll serve
This worked, but it took me to my boring index page with no styling. I noticed that the 404.html page that came with my theme had layout: default in the front matter, so I added this to my index. The site regenerated, and now I have styling.