Embed ANYTHING: Quality Jekyll Plugins from Scratch

By Rachael Wright-Munn

Elevator Pitch

Let’s deconstruct the internals of the gem Jekyll-Twitch. Building a great Jekyll Plugin involves various tech. We’ll learn enough about Jekyll, Liquid tags, and GitHub actions to build any plugin you desire and release it as a Gem on RubyGems, even if you start with just an understanding of Ruby.

Description

Do you want to learn how to embed a calendar, YouTube video, Itch.io game, or GitHub repo in your portfolio site? We’ll learn enough about Jekyll, Liquid tags, and GitHub actions to build any plugin you desire and release it as a Gem on RubyGems.

Over the course of 30 minutes, we’ll cover a repeatable process for building Jekyll plugins, why you’d want to do that, and all the architectural decisions you’ll make along the way, as well as the decisions I made in building Jekyll-Twitch.

Even if you start with just an understanding of Ruby, you’ll leave this talk with the tools and resources you need to build your own embed.

Notes

I believe that easy is about familiarity. There’s nothing complicated about building a solid, well-tested Jekyll plugin with a demo site. It just requires an introduction to the technologies used, their purpose, and a good example. Creating Jekyll-Twitch required a lot of research into GitHub Actions, Shopify’s Liquid Tags, the process of creating a Gem with bundler, and Jekyll itself. Now that I’ve completed it, I’m confident that I can reproduce it, and intend to with Jekyll-Itch, a gem for embedding Itch.io games. This talk will introduce all those technologies, their purposes, and how to use them. I’ll hit all the best practices and tips that made my life easier, and link to the relevant guides, blog posts, and PRs where each step happened.

Outline

## What is Jekyll? ## How does Jekyll embed content and what are Liquid Tags?