I had an issue setting up this Jekyll site/ blog where I wanted to replace the default blog page that was at index.html with the about page and have the listing of abreviated blog entries on a separate page that you have to click through to from the home page. I swapped the default Jekyll about.md and index.html files for index.md and blog.html, respectively. The problem was that the index.md wouldn’t build into an index.html as it should. I’m not sure of the exact problem but it was all in the header markdown that you see at the top of every markdown page. I think it was that I didn’t change the titles of the pages to reflect the changes in the filenames and there was a naming conflict. Anyway, after revisiting them index.html is being properly built from index.md.
Here’s the new markdown header for the working index.md page
---
layout: page
title: About
---