This is some basic information about how to write posts in Jekyll, the platform that this fast.ai blog runs on.

None of this has anything to do with AI. But it’s an example of some of the nice side-effects of studying the fast.ai course: you learn some neat tricks! Including this well-explained method for anyone to have their own blog for free, without knowing anything technical, and without ads.

Here’s the table of contents:

  1. How to write blog post files
    1. What is Markdown?
  2. How to write using Markdown code
    1. Basic formatting
    2. Lists
    3. Boxes and stuff
    4. Images
    5. Code
    6. Tables
    7. Footnotes

How to write blog post files

Jekyll requires blog post files to be named according to the following format:

YEAR-MONTH-DAY-filename.md

Where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers, and filename is whatever file name you choose, to remind yourself what this post is about. .md is the file extension for Markdown files.

The first line of the file should start with a single hash character, then a space, then your title. This is how you create a “level 1 heading” in Markdown. Then you can create level 2, 3, etc headings as you wish but repeating the hash character, such as you see in the line ## File names above.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is the simple markup language used to specify text formatting like, bold, italics, and more, as presented briefly below.

More detailed information can be found on the official Markdown page on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball website.

This blog post, like all the other posts on this blog, is of course itself written in Markdown. You can see how this code works by looking at the code for this page in its repository on GitHub.

How to write using Markdown code

Basic formatting

You can use italics, bold, code font text, and create links. Here’s a footnote 1. Here’s a horizontal rule:

Lists

Here’s a list:

  • item 1
  • item 2

And a numbered list:

  1. item 1
  2. item 2

Boxes and stuff

This is a quotation

You can include alert boxes

…and…

You can include info boxes

Images

Code

General preformatted text:

# Do a thing
do_thing()

Python code and output:

# Prints '2'
print(1+1)

2

Tables

Column 1 Column 2
A thing Another thing

Footnotes

  1. This is the footnote. ↩