Some Jekyll Hacks

January 15, 2009

While switching my blog to Jekyll I made several improvements and fixes to the code. You can find these in my Jekyll fork on GitHub.

• I replaced the Maruku library with BlueCloth since Maruku was refusing to parse some of my perfectly valid Markdown. I should probably make this configurable; the code is written so that it can be, there is just nowhere to configure it.
• I changed the post object to include arbitrary YAML properties instead of just a few hard coded ones. This allows tags and categories and other interesting things to get passed around and into the templates.
• I added a special YAML property to allow arbitrary script output to be included in a template. I use this to generate the tag cloud you see on the left. This makes Jekyll able to do really neat things.
• I modified all the URLs to full paths instead of files with extensions. For example, /2009/01/15/some-jekyll-hacks/ instead of /2009/01/15/some-jekyll-hacks.html.
• I added extended body support and time handling, for those of us who write long posts or multiple posts per day.
• I added a new template filter, html_truncatewords which you can use to make summaries of HTML text without worrying about the markup getting messed up.
• I added archive generation support.
• I added some basic Emacs support.

In addition to Jekyll hacks, I also wrote a converter for MovableType which you can also find on GitHub. In that same project I have also included code to convert MovableType comments to Disqus comments.

If you want to see what this all looks like, I have a snapshot of my blog on GitHub as well.