Sometimes you decide that you just need a tag (and category) cloud. The top search result was from SuperDevResources by Kanishk Kunal, which worked pretty well, but I didn't like the sizes, and wanted to have fun colours. Here's my version: Read more

Many and varied are the ways to add comments to your static website. Most of them involve subscribing to services which, if you're running your own domain on your own server, might strike you as the wrong solution. "But," you might say, "if I want to have a comment system on my own site, it would not be static anymore. CGi's are so '90s and who needs the attack vector?"

I was trying to do a simple math thing with Ruby when it occured to me that maybe it wasn't working because I wasn't using an up to date Ruby. Since I was intending to upgrade Jekyll from 3.x to 4.x, I thought "let's just do it all!!!"

The Building Blocks

One of the main goals of creating this new theme is to synthesize from best practices and standards and such. The big pieces were structured data, HTML5, CSS3, and responsive web design. While searching around for HTML5 stuff, I hit upon HTML5 Boilerplate which seemed to me to be an excellent starting place.

There is annoying little documentation about writing a generator for Jekyll, particularly since when searching for examples, there is so much noise in form of hits for "static site generator." Two decent examples are from Ricardo Lopes and Starr Horne of Honeybadger.

Starting at the beginning, you want to be putting my_generator.rb in _plugins/ in the root directory of your Jekyll site directory.

For an absolute "Hello, World" we can do:

class Generator < Jekyll::Generator
  def generate(site)
    puts "Hello, World!"
  end
end