Jekyll::Cover

👋 Howdy! Welcome to the v 0.2.0 of Jekyll::Cover, a custom command to build og:image for new posts through the command line.

Why?

I did not want to open Figma anymore, and decided that running something like jekyll cover --path /path/to/my/post/ would be faster! And building the gem would be more fun.

What?

Here's a sample of an image built with Jekyll::Cover.

This picture is a mix of rmagick canvas and image manipulation, a couple of .pngs stored on my website (namely the picture of my face, and the hand-drawn mountain), and the text is extracted from the post's front matter.

How?

This gem does a few things:

• takes a path as argument,
• parse the relevant post for necessary information such as a title, a date, etc...
• build an image from scratch through a mix of instructions and images w/ rmagick,
• build the folder structure if need be to store the image,
• add the path of the new image to the post.

Usage

Want to use Jekyll::Cover with your Jekyll blog? Here how to do it:

1. Read the Disclaimers section below: the gem is as of now, only a proof-of-concept. Be aware of its shortcomings.
2. Fork the gem and clone the gem on your local machine.
3. Add the gem to your gemfile

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-cover', git: 'https://github.com/your_username/jekyll-cover.git', branch: 'main'
end

4. Run bundle install
5. You can use the jekyll cover command! ✨

  bundle exec jekyll cover -p _posts/path-to-your-new-post.md

6. Check your setup or change the gem's code accordingly

• Your posts front matter should have a cover_image variable.
• Your images should be stored in a /media folder.
• Check the Jekyll::Cover::CoverImage::CATEGORIES_DECORS constant: those are files I use to decorate my cover image based on the post category. You should change those.
• Check the Jekyll::Cover::FrontMatter::DEFAULT_VARIABLES constant. You might want to change its content.

Disclaimers

⚠️ I built this gem is for my personal use and on my personal time, hence it's very crude, untested, and only works for the quirks of my own website.

I'll probably make it more usable for others in the future, but for now, it's mostly a personal proof of concept.

Update 10 Jul 2024: V 0.2.0 is out!

V 0.2.0 does exactly the same thing as v0.1.0, but better 😜:

• cleaner abstractions w/ cleaner APIs
• better validations and return errors: Is your command valid? Do you already have an image linked to your post? etc...
• less resource intensive for generating the image.

Still a lot of rough edges, but I'm happy to move toward a more flexible command that'll eventually allow other people to use the gem off the shelf.

Shout out

The idea for building a gem was born from my own itch ("How can I generate posts' cover images with a Jekyll command?") and from reading Rebuilding Rails by Noah Gibbs.