blog

• CSS completed, time to deploy

  There were some things that could be improved in the styling, so I went into the Sass file and added some code.

  I wanted to make the menu look better, so I used display: flex. I adjusted this for different sizes so it looks much better now. I also fixed the contact form so it looks more appealing, and made a few adjustments to spacing of the content.

  I think I have reached a state of completion and now it is time to deploy. My plan is to upload to github and use netlify. I hopefully will not have any problems, but we will see. Overall I enjoyed using jekyll. Since it is mostly code based I find it’s easier to work with than wordpress. I find it strange that I have come to this conclusion, because by all accounts wordpress is supposed to be easy to use, but perhaps I just had a difficult experience with it the first time around. It also seems that jekyll has some bugs, or maybe some features I am not fully understanding yet. I will make another jekyll blog in the future for more practice, as I said in a previous post.

• Wow that was fast

  My contact form is now working!

  I can’t believe how easy this was. I just googled “jekyll form plugins” and the first recommended option on jekyllthemes.io was Formspree. I quickly signed up, put the link into the action of my form, verified my email, and done! Now I can receive messages from people.

  The form does not look very nice, so now I will look into the CSS and see if there are any changes I can make to the contact page, and hopefully the navigation as well - it looks a little boring at the moment.

• Fun with collections

  I noticed the “collections” requirement on the assignment and I was not sure what to do. I assumed that creating a collection, and displaying it on a page, would fit this requirement.

  I decided to create a colleciton about travel, as I enjoy traveling and never really write about my trips. I don’t have much time today to really flesh these out and write a lot of detail, but perhaps I can do this in the future. It might actually be fun to create my own travel blog at some point. It would also help me work on my web dev skills. Maybe I can try another jekyll blog? Or wordpress? Honestly, though, jekyll seems more appealing to work with as you seem to have more control.

  Anyway, writing about travel was fun, now let’s move on. I believe now I need to install a plugin. Perhaps now is a good time for another back-up, in case I struggle with the pluggin. I think a plugin relating to forms would be a good choice here.

• No more pagination

  The past couple days I was trying to get pagination to work. I believe in the last post I said a classmate mentioned that there was a paginate version 2.

  I gave this a try, because I really did not want to move all of my blog posts onto the index page in order to get pagination to work. I am not sure what I did wrong, but I kept getting errors. I read a few articles on pagination, but they all had different instructions. I tried to piece them together, added code to my config file, my gem file, and possibly other files. I found out, however, that pagination is no longer a requirement, so I may leave this for another project.

• Pagination

  One thing I need to attempt today is pagination. I tried it a few days ago, but it did not work. When I tried googling for solutions, I found that pagination only works on the index page.

  This is different from what I have heard from a classmate, who said if you are using version 2 it should not be an issue. I am going to look into this and see what happens.

• Backing up my files

  Because I had the problem of things getting deleted, and things deciding not to work (there must be a logical reason for this, I hope…), I am making a back-up of all my files. Currently they are all working I would like to not repeat all of these steps later…

• Blog stopped working and now works again

  First of all, I would like to give credit to the Jekyll documentation step-by-step tutorial for giving me the code to work with on my blog page.

  I am not sure what happened exactly, but for a while my blog page decided to stop working. Upon searching on stack overflow I noticed some people were having issues with the _site folder deleting and regenerating each time you serve the site again. I had this problem as well, because my logo decided it would just disappear when I served the site again.

  This is because I placed it directly in the img folder inside of _site. I learned from this that you DON’T TOUCH the _site folder. That is for jekyll to render your site. From this I also learned that you need to use “jekyll build” when you make changes to your site, then re-serve it. Seems to be working so far but I am a bit shaky on my understanding of it.

  After messing around in the code a fair bit, and doing severl “jekyll build” & “bundle exec jekyll serve”, something changed and my blog now works (again). I suspect it has something to do with the commands I mentioned above.

• The theme is working!

  Update - I got the theme to work! In our assignment guidelines we were told to choose from one of the github pages themes. I found that I didn’t particularly like most of the themes, especially as a design person. They were just not my style. I chose the “minimal” theme and I decided I would just try to customize it more to my liking.

  I struggled in class this week to get a theme to work. I suppose that is just because I didn’t know what I was doing yet. I must have been missing some critical yet small piece to the puzzle. Today I tried this strategy and had success:

  -set up my site folder with a few pages, posts, layouts, navigation, and data -download the theme folder from github onto my machine -copied files one by one into my site folder, being careful about which ones I wanted to replace -made sure the gem file and config file were from the minimal theme -used command “bundle install” -then command “bundle exec jekyll serve” -realized that I needed the minimal layouts in my site folder, made a few changes to my pages -now I am seeing my pages, with the minimal theme. Yay!

• Blog is working

  I just saved my post, and used the command “bundle exec jekyll serve” to start serving my site to localhost:4000. It appears that my posts are showing up on this page and working as expected. Once I have more posts created I will consider creating categories.

  As of right now I think I would like to “live blog” my experience creating this site, if you will. I cannot find the instructions for what the content of the posts should be, but I think as long as it is my own content it should be fine. If I have other content relating to art, photography, or other things,I can make categories for those things, and set it up so I have pages that display the posts from these categories only.

• First Post

  This is my first post on my Jekyll website. On this site I am creating a blog with enough posts to require pagination. I am plannning to create posts about my experience with Jekyll, thoughts on web development, and stories about my photos and art that you can see on this site. Now that I have a post and most of my pages created, I am going to try installing a theme. I struggled with this when I first started, and I suspect that I am missing a small yet crucial piece, so today I am going to try again and see what happens. Wish me luck.