Whipper Snapper

This upstart is for building a blog on Jekyll, hosted on Heroku, using Unicorn. It includes support for HAML and Sass, and also Foundation, for being responsive. My live site is http://jeffvincent.me, and most of what I've got here is hodge-podge from other jekyll repos and things I've learned.

I will do my absolute best to give credit where credit is due (pretty much everywhere).

Usage

Getting Started

After cloning, bundle install:

$ gem install bundler
$ bundle install

Open the base.haml layout and update the metadata tag with your name and content. Good for SEO I suppose.

Adding Content

I added a rake task for creating new posts

$ rake np title="post title"

Styling Changes

Custom changes belong in the _sass/screen.sass file.

Compiling / Previewing Changes

Rake tasks exist for doing the two things I do most - preview changes, and deploy updates to github and heroku.

• rake preview will compile haml-based layouts, sass->css, and generate the site.
• rake deploy will push to github master and heroku master.

Languages/Framework Support

HAML

The best way to design layouts is to use HAML. Jekyll doesn't have great built in support for HAML at this point, so I added a plugin for conversion (code is not my own, see file for source attribution). http://haml.info/

Sass

I use Sass for pre-processing style - it's just so clean and powerful, you should use it too. http://sass-lang.com/

Compass

Compass is basically a group of mixins. Other developers are better than I am at cross-browser compatibility, so I use their mixins to keep my code really clean. http://compass-style.org/

Foundation

Foundation is a responsive framework built by the folks at Zurb. I have taken the liberty of installing this by default. http://foundation.zurb.com/

Structure

.
|-- .gitignore
|-- .rvrmc
|-- Gemfile
|-- Procfile
|-- README
|-- Rakefile
|-- _config.yml  
|-- _includes
|-- _layouts  
|   |-- haml
|       `-- base.haml
|       `-- post.haml
|   |-- base.html
|   `-- post.html
|-- _plugins
|   `-- haml_converter.rb
|-- _posts  
|   `-- 2012-07-02-test-post.md
|-- _sass
|   `-- _settings.sass
|   `-- app.sass
|   `-- screen.sass
|-- config
|   `-- unicorn.rb
`-- config.rb
`-- config.ru
|-- images
|    `-- all_your_base.png  
`-- index.html  
|-- stylesheets
|    `-- ie.css  
|    `-- print.css  
|    `-- screen.css 

There is probably more in there that anyone will need, but I wanted to be as helpful as possible. To keep in that vein, I'll try and go over them below.

Troubleshooting

I certainly had my share of problems/issues. Jekyll has a pretty vibrant community of developers. I found the 'google this' approach answered most of my questions, and I included most of the best links in a document 'building_a_jekyll_site.md' that you can find in the base.

To-Do

1. Adding support for Sinatra? So folks can use contact forms, etc.
2. Update Deploy Would like to use post-commit hooks through Github instead.