something new- actually producing 'content'

Jun 21, 2019

Where we are

The site is pretty built! There are definitely things that could be improved:

• Photography section should have a lightbox, more photos, and better organization by time/theme

• About me page is empty right now

• Home page doesn’t welcome and sort visitors very effectively

However, I think this is pretty good progress. So far, I’ve learned:

• How Jekyll works. Here’s a quick summary:

  • Jekyll is a tool for quickly and easily building a blog-centric website.

  • You can easily build entirely new pages by creating a new folder within your main directory and creating an index.html (or index.md! It converts automatically!). This is how a barebones site might look, structure-wise. If you wanted to add an “About Me” page, you would create a new folder in the first tier (e.g. same level as “_posts”) and within that, a new index.html

  • It works really nicely with Github Pages, which will rebuild your site with every new commit you push

  • It relies heavily on a feature called “Layouts”, which allows you to templatize page structure. Then, your content will be “injected” via Liquid. Here are the docs on Layouts— the {{ content }} in the Usage section is where your content will be injected

  • This is a really good step-by-step guide, and the one that I used

  • The above guide only goes into making changes on Github.com via your web browser. If you want to play around and test changes before committing, you need to set up a local version of your site on your own personal computer. This means learning Terminal (on Mac) or Command Prompt (Windows). I used this tutorial from Github

• How to use the Command Line Interface (CLI) (aka Terminal) to test changes locally

  • Basic Git commands

  • A quick unexpected detour and immediate U-turn out of Vi

  • The terror of a rebase and the importance of git pulling a lot

• How to fiddle around with DNS settings to set up a custom domain

Now what

• I want to tune up the flow of the site and make the Home page a little more guided for anybody coming to visit

• I want to add another Page about Books, kind of like how Sam T Davies does

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