create-a-blog.md

title	Create a peer-to-peer blog
section	tutorials
sectionTitle	Tutorials
order	1

Creating a blog on Beaker is easy to do with a static site generator. In this tutorial, we’ll use Jekyll. Start by following their instructions for creating a new blog:

bash ```bash ~$ gem install jekyll bundler ~$ jekyll new my-awesome-p2p-blog ~$ cd my-awesome-p2p-blog ```

My blog is located at ~/my-awesome-p2p-blog, which means that the site it generates is located at ~/my-awesome-p2p-blog/_site.

Update your _config.yml:

_config.yml ```yaml # Blog settings title: My Awesome P2P Blog email: "pfrazee@foo.com" description: Software, decentralization, and peer-to-peer systems. twitter_username: pfrazee github_username: pfrazee

Build settings

markdown: kramdown theme: minima gems:

• jekyll-feed exclude:
• Gemfile
• Gemfile.lock

Run `jekyll build` to generate your site’s files:

<figcaption class="code">bash</figcaption>
```bash
~/my-awesome-p2p-blog $ jekyll build

Configuration file: /Users/paulfrazee/my-awesome-p2p-blog/_config.yml
            Source: /Users/paulfrazee/my-awesome-p2p-blog
       Destination: /Users/paulfrazee/my-awesome-p2p-blog/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
                    done in 0.854 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.

Now, let’s create the site in Beaker. Open the dropdown menu in Beaker, and select “New site”:

Click "New site" in the dropdown menu

Fill in the title and description of your blog:

Set the title and description

Click "Create site" and Beaker will take you to the library page for your site:

Your new site in your Library

By default, Beaker creates a new folder for you under the ~/Sites directory. In this case, we want to pick our own folder, because we want to use the ./_site folder within our Jekyll blog. To select the _site directory, click "Change folder" in the Library dropdown menu.

Select "Change folder" in the library dropdown

For my blog, I set the folder to ~/my-awesome-p2p-blog/_site:

Choose ~/my-awesome-p2p-blog/_site

You’ll see Beaker's staging area populate with the new changes immediately.

The staging area shows unpublished changes

We'll publish in a moment. First, let's click “View site” to see how the site looks.

The unpublished site

OK! It looks pretty good so far. Check out the Jekyll documentation to learn how to author content and change the styles.

Jekyll has a builtin command, bundle exec jekyll serve, for previewing your site on a local development server. But Beaker serves your site for you at its Dat URL, so you just need Jekyll to do the build process:

bash ```bash ~/my-awesome-p2p-blog$ jekyll build --watch ```

There’s one last step before you can share your blog; you need to publish your files. Back in the Library page for your blog, you should see your changes listed:

The staging area shows unpublished changes

This is the staging area. It shows all the local changes that you’ve made, but haven’t yet published. Until you publish, only you will be able to see the changes.

Click “Publish,” and the changes will be committed to your site.

Click “Publish” and the site is ready

Now you can share the URL to anybody using Beaker, and keep your computer online, and they’ll be able to download the site.

One last tip: once you have jekyll build --watch running, Jekyll will automatically generate a new version of your site when you make updates. If you want Beaker to automatically reload the page too, you can turn on Live reloading:

Turn on live reloading

Navigate to the site, click the dropdown menu in the top right, then click “Turn on live reloading.” You'll see a lightning symbol in the URL bar. Now, any time you make a change, the site will auto-refresh.