Using Jekyll for Website without Blog

Question

I'd like to use Jekyll for my website, but I can't figure out how to set it up. All of the documentation I've seen shows how to use Jekyll to set up a blog. I just want to write Markdown and have Jekyll convert it to a website.

I understand that this question is a bit vague and the terminology may not be perfectly accurate. I'm new to creating a website and I don't want to learn HTML.

(Disclosure: My website will be for a project on GitHub.)

Answer 1

There's four types of document that you can find in a Jekyll site :

• Static files like js, css or even html page. They don't have a front matter, are simply copied at generation time and can be found in the site.static_files hash,

• posts they are located in _posts folder, have a front matter and can be found in the site.posts hash by liquid,

• pages they can be anywhere in your folder structure, have a front matter and can be found in the site.pages hash by liquid,

• collections that are more elaborated pieces of datas with a front matter and can be found in site.collections hash by liquid.

You can choose to use any of them. If you don't want to use posts, just remove or empty the _posts folder and just use pages.

Answer 2

If all you want to do is write markdown and have that generate a single page for a project, consider using the GH-pages automatic generator.

In step 3 you write the content for your page in Github-flavoured Markdown and then select a layout to publish it in.