Project Overview

This project is a personal blog built with Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. The blog is hosted on GitHub Pages. The content is written in Markdown, and the site’s appearance is controlled by HTML layouts and CSS.

Key Technologies

  • Jekyll: The static site generator used to build the blog.
  • Ruby: The programming language Jekyll is written in. Dependencies are managed with Bundler and defined in the Gemfile.
  • Markdown: The format used for writing blog posts.
  • HTML/CSS: Used for the site’s structure and styling.
  • GitHub Pages: The hosting platform for the blog.

Building and Running

The project includes several shell scripts to streamline the development process.

  • Previewing the site: To preview the site locally, including drafts and future posts, run the following command:

    ./_preview.sh

    This will start a local web server at http://0.0.0.0:4000/.

  • Building the site: The jekyll serve command in the _preview.sh script also builds the site. For a production build, you can use:

    bundle exec jekyll build

Development Conventions

Creating New Posts

To create a new draft, use the _new_draft.sh script:

./_new_draft.sh <draft_name>.md

This will create a new Markdown file in the _drafts directory, pre-filled with a template, and open it in vim.

Publishing Posts

To publish a draft, use the _publish.sh script with the path to the draft file:

./_publish.sh _drafts/<draft_name>.md

This script will:

  1. Add the file to the Git staging area.
  2. Rename and move the file to the _posts directory, using the date from the post’s front matter to create the filename in the format YYYY-MM-DD-draft_name.md.

Deployment

The site is deployed automatically by GitHub Pages whenever changes are pushed to the main branch. The _publish.sh script handles staging the new post, which can then be committed and pushed to deploy.