Jekyll2017-01-03T20:17:37-08:00http://alistair.com/Alistair Calder: Husband, father, senior systems analyst and faculty (on leave) from BC Institute of Technology, and a Master's student at Royal Roads University.Alistair Calder2017-01-03T00:00:00-08:002017-01-03T00:00:00-08:00http://alistair.com/trying-out-jekyll-cms<p>I have been playing with Jekyll, a static site generator, on and off for a couple of years. I really like the direct control you have, writing posts and pages in Markdown, <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/docs/assets/">Sass-aware</a> stylesheet development, the ease of developing templates.</p> <p>Recently, I came across a somewhat recent project: <a href="https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin">Jekyll Admin</a>. While I still love creating and managing content and templates within <a href="https://www.sublimetext.com/">Sublime Text</a> or with <a href="http://www.vim.org/">vim</a>, it’s nice to have a UI that gives me access to create/edit/delete Posts &amp; Pages as well as manage static, data and config files.</p> <p>Additionally, the opportunity to add/edit/delete metadata fields makes Jekyll Admin particularly great. As of this writing, I am using a number of metadata fields for header images, attribution and creative commons links. The UI makes it very easy to manage.</p> <p><a href="http://alistair.com">This</a> was made with <a href="https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-admin">that</a>.</p>Alistair Calder

I have been playing with Jekyll, a static site generator, on and off for a couple of years. I really like the direct control you have, writing posts and pages in Markdown, Sass-aware stylesheet development, the ease of developing templates.

2016-11-15T00:00:00-08:002016-11-15T00:00:00-08:00http://alistair.com/its-been-a-while<p>I’ve had this domain for as long as the Web has been a thing. I haven’t shared much with it over the years, keeping my projects and online resources off the public face of this site. I’ve had many experiments for work, contract and personal stuff but rarely anything public.</p> <p>I think about what I could do with the site all the time, but it takes time and effort and I don’t have a lot of either one of those by the end of the week. I work with the web all day long in my day job, so there isn’t much inspiration or exploration left.</p> <p>I found Jekyll a few years ago and thought it was a great idea, loved the hands-on model and launched a few demo sites with it. I wasn’t ready to push this site live with it until I could develop a theme that I liked. However, things languished and I decided to just launch with Minima, the default theme that coes with most Jekyll installs.</p> <p><img src="/assets/images/2016-11-16-minimal-mistakes.png" alt="Minimal Mistakes - Jekyll Theme" class="align-left" /> Recently I came across <a href="https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/">Minimal Mistakes</a>, an excellent theme by Michael Rose. A well developed theme with tons of options, I decided to just build this site with it. I haven’t made many changes, but that doesn’t mean none are coming. I’m starting to feel a little excited about developing this site again.</p>Alistair Calder

I’ve had this domain for as long as the Web has been a thing. I haven’t shared much with it over the years, keeping my projects and online resources off the public face of this site. I’ve had many experiments for work, contract and personal stuff but rarely anything public.