T’is the season, by which I mean the season where some of us have down-time to do a little practical learning with code. And what better way to learn this time of year than by making a toy you can actually play with.

During my time at Simpleweb I’ve learnt an incredible amount of tools, techniques, practices and general front-end development knowledge. In this article I’d like to share just a few of the things I’ve learnt that will hopefully make your front-end work easier, more productive or more enjoyable.

Alright, so I didn’t actually drop the mic on Netlify; I dropped a site on it. Netlify Drop is a tool where you can grab a folder containing a site or app or whatever and drop it straight into the Netlify hosting platform.

In Part 1, I gave an overview of creating themes for Jekyll and a few tips for when you’re developing your own theme. In this second part, I’m going to give a full step-by-step guide to developing your own Jekyll theme gem.

By nature, any well structured site that has easily editable content is ‘themeable’ — a layer, or skin, that presents content in the way the owner or creator intended; Jekyll is no different. Pages, posts and any other form of formatted content can be segregated from the templating files.