My blog about vacations, motorcycles, chickens, and random thoughts. I also do a “things that interest me” Tumblr, and a political Tumblr.
Comments, thoughts, or want to contact me?
This site is built using Jekyll. Jekyll takes a bunch of Markdown text files which contain just the body text of the post, and some templates which contain styling and navigation information, and quickly builds the entire site as a big collection of organized and linked together HTML pages.
Styling things is not one of my strengths, so I began with a basic structure and look provided initially by the Poole project and refined and extended by the Lanyon project.
I wanted an Archive page, so those mechanics were sourced from Zak at Mitsake. I was surprised that Lanyon didn’t include Previous/Next Post links, so some Googling found Vito Botta’s page with some helpful mechanisms. Finally I coded up a way to group common things together, such as several posts about one trip.
Most of the images are hosted at my Flickr account and I use Gifyu to host GIFs. I can quickly add Markdown image links by navigating Safari to the desired Flickr image then typing a TextExpander abbreviation, thanks to Dr. Drang’s currentflickr and flickr-stuff which uses the FlickrAPI.
It did take quite a while to set this all up, but the nice thing is that now I can keep revisions of the site in a Git repository. I lost what seemed to be some fragile setup details when I fried my SSD in early spring 2016. As helpful as Apple’s Time Machine backup was, it does not bring back my Ruby Gems and their installation details. Jekyll had undergone some major changes, requiring changes to get things going again.
Previously:
Anyway, when it is working, I can add a new post and preview it using Jekyll’s “web server” function on my Mac. Now I am using Bitbucket Pipelines to build the web pages and automatically update the webserver – this makes it possible for me to update the site from an iPad using the Working Copy app. In all, it’s been a pain to set up, but now creating a new post or article is fairly easy. Maybe not as painless as it is at Tumblr, but possibly easier than it was at Blogger, and I control everything on the site.
Currently the process is undergoing significant modifications prompted by my long-time web-hosting service ImagineIS shutting down. The site is now built and served (for free!) via Vercel. However, Jekyll has been significantly updated and my old build configuration no longer quite works, so various things need updating to work with the new versions.