Welcome to my new site!

Published: Sep 6, 2014 by C.S. Rhymes

Hello and welcome to my new site, powered by Jekyll.

This is my first post on my blog. Let me know what you think of the site by sending me a tweet to @chrisrhymes

Learning about Jekyll

I’m a web developer but I normally use PHP. I was looking for a way to update my GitHub page and stumbled across Jekyll. After reading the documentation I noticed that it used Ruby and the install instructions were all for Linux. Not the best start considering I use a Windows laptop and a chromebook.

After a bit more research I noticed that @juthilo had written a guide for installing Jekyll on Windows. So I set about installing Ruby and Jekyll and managed to get a basic site working. Great.

But I wasn’t too keen on the layout of the site so I decided to try and use Foundation. To be honest, I’m still a bit new to this whole command line installing and opensource but I tried to set up a Jekyll project and then add Foundation to it. After a while of not getting very far I jumped over to GitHub.

There seemed to be plenty of people that had created repositories with both Jekyll and Foundation installed but they had all been customised a lot and seemed to have a lot of additional code and settings that I didn’t really want.

In the end, I created a Jekyll project and then downloaded Foundation and integrated the files manually. This seemed to work, but the biggest issue I had was working from pieces of a page (in layouts and includes) and reconstructing them. I would recommend building a set of pages first and then deconstructing them to put into the relevant parts.

Using Jekyll

So once I got the foundation in place I started to explore a bit more to see what Jekyll can do. Although I have never used Ruby or the Liquid template engine before it seemed quite obvious what the tags do. I have to say, I am very impressed with Ruby and will have to try out some more tools to see how it works. If you have any suggestions for where to start, please let me know.