Use Jekyll Manager Instead of Jekyll Admin

I was hesitant in making a change at first, since I just started blogging using Jekyll. Looking at how updates are freshly being added to the jekyll-admin library made me think it’s more intuitive. I am wrong. However, the upgrades done in jekyll-manager isn’t really all that drastic. They still haven’t got a fix for when selecting the image metadata. It is still http://localhost:4000/blog/assets/images/…jpg when I select an image from the static files. I wonder why they haven’t dealt this yet. This should have been the turning point of their fork. Instead, a few UI changes have been made. Some, impressive.

This is my favorite part about jekyll-manager and to be honest, the only thing I care about, really. Directories can be navigated to now, therefore making uploading a hell of a lot easier, now that I’m confident to use this dashboard for uploading images. I no longer have to drag and drop using Finder for this.

The metadata too has changed. It is, by default, hidden and expandable. It’s quite confusing why it’s called a FRONT MATTER, instead of metadata. And by default too, layout is the first metadata you’ll be able to see. There’s a select dropdown for the choices for layout. Since in our config.yml, layout is set to post by default, then you can choose to remove this metadata field. tags has this cool feature that allows you to select from previous used tags. However, this feature is still buggy. I found a bug when I try removing a word. It removes the previous word instead of the current word (tag) that needs removing. It’s just sad that it doesn’t work the same with categories. Hence, when typing multiple categories, just separate them with spaces and not a comma.

The text editor’s panel for tools is now dark but overall, it works the same and still no Grammarly functionality. I mean Grammarly is disabled when using the text editor, but not on other text fields. Bummer.

For the most part, it looks almost exactly like jekyll-admin and better, but I don’t understand why there isn’t any noticeable changes in jekyll-admin that will make it better than the 2 years ago maintaned code of jekyll-manager.

Automating

You might want to lessen the technicality of going through terminal to go to your blog directory and serving jekyll to access admin. You can do this by opening Automator. You have this preinstalled on your Mac OS. Create a new workflow, then choose to run shell script like so:

Type in what you’d normally type on your terminal.

cd /Directory/To/Your/Blog
source ~/.bash_profile
bundle exec jekyll serve --watch

If you run it and everything goes smoothly, try opening localhost:4000/admin on your browser. That’s how you’ll know if it works. And if it does, you may close the Automator and it’ll ask you to save the script. Save it as Application to your preferred directory. If you ever need to access the admin dashboard of your blog, just double-click like you would on a normal app. You might be surprised. This also works for pushing all your changes to github.