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.

Share

Latest Posts

Upgrading a Laravel Vapor app to PHP 8.2

I recently updated a Laravel app running on Laravel Vapor to PHP 8.2. I was a bit nervous about the upgrade but it went smoothly for me. This article goes through the steps I went through to upgrade, from local development environment, dependencies, testing and deployment to vapor.

Building a VS Code Extension for Gutenberg blocks

I have been tasked with building a new website using WordPress. The last time I used WordPress was a few years ago and involved using Advanced Custom Fields to build custom pages and layouts. Things have changed a lot over the years and now there is the built in Gutenberg editor, which uses blocks to create a custom layout and add content. The trouble was, there didn’t seem to be great support in Visual Studio Code for the blocks, as they use HTML comments.

Using Pest to test Laravel Livewire validation rules

Last year I wrote a post about testing Laravel Livewire validation rules with PHP Unit. This post uses the same techniques as that post, but shows how to transfer it to Pest instead of PHP Unit.