How To Build A Digital Garden With Jekyll

Digital Garden

A digital garden is sort of kind of a blog where you learn in public.

This means you put your ideas and notes in there.

And, over time, you keep tinkering and evolving your best ideas.

People visting your digital garden may or may not be inspired by your ideas.

And they can even borrow the best ones.

This is what I did and I decided I had to build mine.

Building Your Own Digital Garden

The way I build my digital garden was using Jekyll.

I’m ok with tinkering with configuration files and behind the scenes.

If you’re not afraid to get down down and dirty with the technical aspects of building a website, this guide is for you.

All in all, it’s not very complicated.

(Post is still under construction)

Prerequisites

You will need to install these before continuing:

• Install Ruby
  • https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
• Install Jekyll
  • https://jekyllrb.com/
• Install git
  • https://git-scm.com/download/win

Setting up Jekyll

• Configuring the Gemfile
  • adding missing dependencies
• Installing A Theme
  • You will need to install a Jekyll theme for your site. My choice was the Chirpy Jekyll Theme
• Building the site

Adding Content

• Preparing a few posts
• The theme expects the files to respect the following requirements:
  • Must have a minimal front matter section at the start of each file, consisting of:
    • Title
    • Author
    • Date
    • Category
  • The file name must end with .md (from Markdown)
  • The file name should be prefixed by a date
  • Example
    • File Name: 2024-03-11-Twitter Content Strategy.md
    • Basic FrontMatter
    • 
• Edit your posts with a text editor
  • Obsidian
  • Atom
  • Notepad++
• Prepare your files with my Mass Add YAML FrontMatter App

Testing The Site Locally

After everything is said and done, we want to test our site locally.

Open a command line by pressing Start then write cmd and press ENTER.

Navigate to the digital garden’s folder.

In our case, the garden’s in D:\GIT\GARDEN

Then run this command:

bundle exec jekyll serve –trace

Now you can view the site locally.

Open a browser window and enter https://localhost:4000/

Here we go, we are running the site locally:

To make things easier, you can place the previous command in a batch file.

You will run the .bat file every time you want to start Jekyll locally.

Here are the contents of my start_jekyll.bat

@echo off
bundle exec jekyll serve –trace

Uploading The Site

Create a subdomain

This is where your site will live.
I use subdomains to test sites before taking them live.

Archive the contents of the _site folder

You need to upload _site.zip to your subdomain’s folder.

And unarchive it there.

Now the site is live on the subdomain!