Choosing between fast_template and fastpages

In Appendix A the course book suggests using fast_template. It also suggests looking on the course website for the latest blog recommendations. I couldn’t see any blog recommendations on the course website, so I searched the forum and found a post by Jeremy which mentions fastpages and explains the difference between fast_template and fastpages. It sound like fastpages has all the features of fast_template as well as extra automation and features, so I decided to give it a go.

Setting up my blog using fastpages

To set up my blog I followed the Setup instructions. The video tutorial by Abdul Majed which they linked had some extra details which were helpful.

Writing blog posts locally on my computer

Page 555 of the book suggests using GitHub Desktop in order to write blog posts locally. Because I’ve used git before, I instead cloned the repository and am writing this in VS Code.

Making the blog post format correctly

Initially my blog post looked like this:

To get the page to format correctly I had to add Front Matter, following these instructions.