I pared it back from Mark’s more complex use case and reworked the templates and stylesheets a bit to make them more HTML5-y, but there’s still a way to go. Eventually, I’d like to use the new semantic tags throughout and make the design my own.
I tweaked the 404 page to (naïvely) extract the words from bad URLs and
pre-fill the Google search box. Still on the search engines theme I also added
an XML Sitemap template – which lists the index, archive, and every
post – and a robots.txt
which references it.
Following Benjamin Thomas’ guide I now use a custom jekyll
command which loads extension code when processing the site (without having to
fork Jekyll itself). At the moment, this is just loading Jack Moffitt’s
html_truncatewords
filter.
The new filter is used in the index, archives, and Atom feed templates and the
<meta>
tags to generate a description when a post does not have an excerpt.
I plan on extending the set of meta-data included in each page to include as
much of the Dublin Core Element Set as makes sense. Some of it
will come from the site and post YAML data, but others will need custom Liquid
tags to determine the correct values automatically.
In all, it’s been a busy couple of evenings but Jekyll is refreshingly simply and delightfully easy to start hacking with.
]]>I’ve posted off and on since then but it’s been sporadic and rather lacklustre.
At least part of this was due to the tedium of using my cobbled-together blogging platform of Wordpress with a bunch of plugins. Combining the built-in Wordpress formatting with Markdown, a number of syntax highlighting solutions and two or three other filters didn’t make for the easiest or more reliable system.
Now, though, I’m taking the next step and jumping on the semi-custom blog software bandwagon (and the static site bandwagon, and the Ruby bandwagon while I’m at it). I’ve replaced my old Wordpress blog with a static site generated with Jekyll from Markdown source.
I wasted ages – months and months – pretending to write my own system in Haskell, but I was just lying to myself. I gave in and chose Jekyll as system I’d heard good things about (in a language I’d heard good things about). Then I wasted more months pretending to design my own layout, but I was still lying to myself. Tonight I admitted that I was never going to finish and decided to use Mark Reid’s excellent and open source design, at least to start with.
A few hours later, and it’s done. I’ve pared Mark’s templates down a little so that they fit my content, run it through Jekyll, and now it’s live.
In the not too distant future (read: never) I intend to modify the design and make it my own. In the mean time, enjoy the content.
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