I’m shaping my blog, trimming bits here and there, and cultivating other areas that are too sparse. Look out for the NFO section. I’m adding whatever I can possibly add to it. I may add more. Probably adding links where I can.
I’ll write an actual “how-to” style post here soon. I promise. It’s bound to happen at some point.
Boy did I herp before I derped. All this time I could’ve been posting thumbnailed images, but I didn’t peek into the specifics of Kramdown or how to do it. Ruby seems to be a literal octopus of a language, with all these parsers and things. Ruby seems to be the new Visual Basic, reinventing spaghetti mess. At least it produces pretty results, though.
[](/link/to/full/image.jpg)Simple tip, excellent results, not sure why I didn’t think to experiment with it in the first place. Maybe because my initial impression of Kramdown was that it’s kinda touchy. Don’t know. In any case, I’m a fan now. I might use Kramdown more often, for more than just this blog. Who knows.
When I first began using Jekyll, I noticed that throwing in a Youtube embedded video made it go apeshit. I Googled for a bit to discover that Maruku wasn’t happy with HTML, and was taking any and all HTML and interpreting it to XHTML. Youtube doesn’t provide “Embed” data in XHTML format. Here is an example of a typical Youtube embed:
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>That’s taken verbatim from Youtube. There are two problems here. First, XHTML
doesn’t like lone attributes. The allowfullscreen attribute has to be changed
to allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" to be usable. If you even use it.
I’ve heard reports of people embedding videos without it at all. Second, Jekyll
devs openly admit Jekyll swallows empty end
tags. Thankfully, their
admission gleans a helpful hint in fixing it. Simply insert a space between
<iframe> and </iframe>. The end result is as such:
If you’ve seen a good number of Jekyll blogs and find yourself pretty jealous, there really aren’t any excuses anymore. Jekyll Bootstrap literally removes all difficulty from using Jekyll. It’s basically a layer over Jekyll that has built in support for theming, post creation, and more. With Jekyll Bootstrap, you really need to know very little of the command line. If you have a favorite theme that’s Jekyll based, chances are that user has made it available on the internet via Github. Hurry up and check it out.
It would seem I have the kinks worked out in my rsync setup. I guess I
herped before derping when setting permissions, not realizing that the only way
to get the binary to execute with a new login group added was to restart the
process. It’s okay, I have a helmet to protect me from myself. It’s padded and
has hexagons like a turtle shell. Hurrrrr.
Aside from that, though, things are going. I’m working still. Always good to have net gain in funds week by week. My feet, arms, and come to think of it- everything hurts. Sometimes it hurts in a gratifying way. Body parts such as my feet, however, not so gratifying. More of a stinging, burning sensation. Cramping also sucks. Back cramps, foot cramps, overall horrible cramping. I’ll survive. I’m not here to bitch, dammit. I’ll cease this at once.
My prior Jekyll setup was as such:
I’ve since decided that was “A Bad Idea™”, and have chosen to offload the work from the EC2 instance to my FreeBSD machine instead, updating content with rysnc as it’s generated. This poses a few minor annoyances for the moment. First, the DSL I’m connected to is currently crawling at a snail’s pace. However, the nice thing is that you, the reader, don’t see all my ugly fuckups as they happen. Instead, you only get to see the pretty pre-formatted pages as they’re ready for print. That’s a major advantage. As I learn Maruku, you’re not forced to watch me painfully learn it’s syntax. Good stuff, huh?
Jekyll is an excellent “simple, blog aware, static site generator”. It allows you to use special shorthand syntax like Textile, Maruku, or other markup syntaxes to quickly and easily generate static blog content. The resources available on the internet for using Jekyll to blog are downright plentiful, and the tool itself is incredibly flexible.
The first thing you’ll have to do is grab a Jekyll layout from a current Jekyll blog. They’re all over the place, and nearly every one I’ve seen has been excellent. Choose what looks good to you. The markup supported is so easy that you can manually edit each layout easily to make it suit your own requirements. You’ll also find a plethora of information on how to include Disqus and other features you may require for your blog. Make it as complex or simple as you please. The nice thing is that you’re less likely to experience server-side scripting problems, since the platform generates static HTML. No SQL or PHP locking down required. Just generate your content and you’re good to go.
I’ve completely fallen in love with Jekyll as a blogging platform. I might create a few more websites or write my own Jekyll template, depending on free time and my mood in the next two weeks. If I’m able to find employment that gives me a moment’s peace, I’ll definitely forge forward with the awesomeness that is a Jekyll tutorial, because I think everyone should get to know this stuff. It’s fun, flexible, and worth investing a little time to research. I’ll drop a link to it in another post some time today.