chrisgilmerproj

I’ve decided to migrate my project blog to use Jekyll and deploy with Github Pages. There are a lot of reasons for this including ease of use, version control, and absolutely no reliance on using a sql database. Primarily I’m making this move to make it easier to post about what I do at work and at home relating to coding, making and related projects. It’s been nearly 3 years since I’ve managed a blog and it’s time I returned to it.

The Jekyll docs are easy to read and installing was a snap. With a few modifications I was easily able to set up a blog that worked for me and migrate all my old wordpress posts.

One thing I really wanted to do was to show my latest post on the homepage of my blog. I found this to be a little easier than expected. While there are no convenience methods for grabbing the latest post you can always limit the number of posts you grab in a query. To do so I edited my index.html file to look like this:

<div id="home">
    {% for post in site.posts limit:1 %}
      <h3><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></h3>
      <p class="meta">{{ post.date | date_to_string }}</p>
      <div class="post">{{post.content}}</div>
    {% endfor %}
  <h3>Latest Posts</h3>
  <ul class="posts">
    {% for post in site.posts limit:5 %}
      <li><span>{{ post.date | date: "%Y-%m-%d" }}</span> &raquo; <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
      <li><span>earlier</span> &raquo; <a href="/archive.html">Archive of Posts</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>

I’m also looking forward to using the built-in syntax highlighting that leverages the Pygments library. I likely will provide examples in bash and python as well as config files in my code but here’s the ruby example that Jekyll provides for you.

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Chris')
#=> prints 'Hi, Chris' to STDOUT.

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