Example Blog Post Errors

This morning I noticed an issue preventing some of the blog posts to show up correctly on the live website. These errors happened mostly because some of the blog authors use the github in-browser editor to create posts rather than testing locally using jekyll before pushing the updates to the live site. This time, there were 3 errors with 3 different levels of severity.

Blog post location

This was the most critical error that caused jekyll to throw up. The issue was that one of the blog posts had be placed in the root directory instead of being placed inside the _posts directory where it belongs. You can place blog posts in any subdirector structure within _posts that you want, but a post with the filename formatted like the following should not be in the root directory: 2014-04-15-example-blog-post-errors.md

Spaces in blog post filename

This error was serious and caused the blog posts affect to show in the blog list, but the contents of the file would only generate an error when viewed. There should not be spaces in the blog post file name. To avoid errors like this, I use the rakefile to create new blog posts and just fill in the blanks. A post file should be 2014-04-15-example-blog-post-errors.md and NOT 2014-04-15-example blog post errors.md.

Block Text

This error would just result in a slightly worse formatted post while all the content was available, and I'd consider it a more minor issue. The important thing to realize is that blocks of text or code should use the tripple ` rather than a tripple ' character. That is the backtick to the left of the 1 key on most American keyboards.