Let's talk design. Blog Site.
I wanted to create a lightweight blog for a developer. I wanted to try to create a blog site with the static site generator Jekyll. The focus of the blog's development would be 'content'. Most Content Management Systems(CMS) have many add-ons that affect page speed and performance. The idea was to design and develop a blog where the post would be the focus avoiding the need for any heavy plugins.
Web Designer & Developer
Me. Myself. And I. + Google + Stack Overflow + Jekyll's Documentation
Jekyll, Ruby, SCSS, Flexbox, and HTML5
Personal Experimentation (Mobile, Web)
I started this project in order to learn Jekyll back in 2017. As the project owner, my duties for this project were UI/UX design, learning Jekyll, Markdown and Liquid and coding the entire site. The idea of no plugins and a make it yourself mentality was a nice challenge. I made the featured post, related posts, social media sharing feature, Facebook commenting and for the page link to be copied when clicked.
My main obstacles were learning Jekyll and utilizing RubyGems. I learned that Jekyll takes templating languages (.md, .scss, etc.) runs it through an engine and spits out HTML, CSS and JS. Because of this, I would be using Markdown and Liquid for the first time. Another obstacle I faced was that any add-ons and functions I needed I would have to build. Unlike the thousands of plugins made for CMS like WordPress, I wouldn't have a plugin library to lean on.
I attended a Frontend Orlando meetup called “Static Site Generators with Brian Rinaldi”. It was at this meetup I learned about Jekyll. I also made use of Jekyll's documentation as a reference guide while building, carefully going through each step for installation. Tears were shed and it took quite a bit of patience. And of course, Google was a useful resource.
Installing the necessary RubyGems and additional installs to get Jekyll to run was troublesome. Also unforeseen laptop issues and using sudo. Properly setting up the config file. Writing in Liquid was different. Having a background in JS and PHP helped with knowing conditionals and more. Using the markup a new experience. Lesson Learned: Don't let difficulty get to you. Take a break and return with a clearer head.
I wanted content to be the focus of this blog. Removing all the bells and whistles and the page speed lag that comes with adding bells and whistles. Lesson Learned: With the focus being content, the content better be good. Creating blog posts will take time.
