Automatic for the People
Blog automation made simple … maybe
While taking a break from my quest to build the perfect blog, I stumbled on a personal blog tweet about one man’s creative solution to the death of good old concert ticket stubs. Being an avid live music fan myself, I miss the days of reliving my favorite concerts while poring through my beloved stub collection.
Rob Weychert’s site, Tinnitus Tracker looks cool, and it’s built with Jekyll, a “blog-aware, static site generator for personal, project, or organization sites.” Maybe this was the solution I’d been seeking! After a lot of experimenting, I’d already decided to ditch re-inventing the wheel – or in this case blog. Instead, I planned to use a headless CMS or similar solution to create a blog that’s somewhat automated, still includes my personal style, and provides blog features like comments and archiving.
First, the good news
Installing Jekyll, which is Ruby based, was a great learning experience. I learned about YAML, which uses key-value pairs (like JSON) to create Jekyll front matter. Front matter sounds like brains, and in a way, it is because it defines the page template, whether it has an assigned permalink, timestamps, etc.
As with creating any blog or app or page in a new framework or language, part of the learning comes in getting the new creation to function correctly online. This experience was no exception. I struggled using Github Pages for the first time, but like the industrious developer I am, I Googled my error that referenced a missing vendor, found a similar Stack Overflow question and answer, and tried that solution. It worked. Voila, my new blog is online.
On second thought, is this the best solution?
Jekyll allows you to create pages in markup, which is what I used for this page. Why not HTML? Jekyll gives you that option, but I can’t quite figure out what happens to the header and footer when I switch to HTML. That automation is, after all, why I chose this solution. Jekyll has a lot of themes, which I need to explore in more detail. In reading all of that documentation I’ll no doubt gain a greater understanding of Jekyll’s scaffolding and how the files interact with each other.
It can be frustrating experimenting with new technologies, and time-consuming too. But it’s incredibly rewarding to tackle a project in a completely new format, work through the errors, draw on previous trial-and-error learning, and finally see the fruits of your labor in your browser. Like my React-Redux experiment and the React-Redux-Firebase project after that, this may not be my final blog solution. But it’s tangible proof of my growth as a developer, and for now, that’s enough.
P.S. I haven’t yet integrated this blog with my portfolio, but for now here’s a link back to my main site: samanthamccallfp18.com. Because the page was created with markup, I didn’t think I could open links in new pages without “target=_blank” after my URL. But guess what? There’s a version of that code just for markup! Who knew? The learning never stops, amirite?