Common Mistakes With Jekyll Front Matter

As I don’t blog very often whenever I create a new blog post in GitHub Pages (using Jekyll’s template framework) there a couple of times I forget the basics and spend a few minutes trying to figure out why the page didn’t load properly.

So this post today is more of a note to self.

Firstly, for blog posts name the file according to the following convention:

YYYY-MM-DD-BlahBlah.md

Secondly, in the front matter area don’t use another colon in the value of the variable. For example don’t do this:

title: Errors: Why do they happen?

Just use another type of punctuation, like:

title: Errors - Why do they happen?

Lastly, every variable in the front matter must contain a name followed by the colon. You cannot create a one-liner variable like this:

redirect_from "yoo/hoo/im-here"

Must be in this type of format in the case of redirect_from:

redirect_from: - yoo/hoo/im-here

Anyway, these are the pesky little bugs that trip me up all the time and tend to cost me a few minutes to an hour of scratching my head trying to figure out what on earth is happening. Hopefully by documenting them I can squash them quicker!