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

So, I was transferring about 5 blogs from Drupal to Jekyll. On Drupal, I had chosen a single theme and just varied the base colours and called it a day. With the move, I thought I would have more fun, pick a different theme from somewhere for each blog. Sounds like fun, no? These gem themes are almost drag and drop, right?? Maybe... If you like exactly what you get out of the box...

I am very fortunate that my sweetie can hack Emacs for me. Oh, sure, I could learn elisp and do it for myself, but the time it would take to level up my proficiency... I take the easy way out. (๑´ㅂ`๑ )

The first thing I needed to do was get the importer to output the post node id so I could match comment to post. While I was mucking about, I changed the categories to tags for a better Jekyll directory structure.