Built with Jekyll

19 Nov 2013

I recently started up this web site. I wanted it to be viewable on both mobile devices and desktops, and Bootstrap seemed like an easy way to do this. I went to the Bootstrap site, and also did a search for “responsive themes” to get some ideas.

Yeah. Ouch.

I didn’t realize this, but everybody seems to be churning out responsive themes using Bootstrap. Thousands of themes, including whole ‘families’ that only change in font or background color, or some stock image. Most of them use older versions of Bootstrap, and I really didn’t feel like learning about an older version of Bootstrap.

So, I grabbed the Bootstrap source, looked at the examples, visited StackOverflow a few times, and I got something similar to what you see now. Wow, Bootstrap is cool!

This was fairly easy to do. First, grab Twitter Bootstrap from https://getbootstrap.com/. I just grabbed the distribution (although I did play with the source from GitHub, I decided later not to use it). I spent time reading, especially the Examples.

After I got the basic site in place, I grabbed some fonts from Google. I never realized there were so many cool fonts there.

With the basics in place, I noticed that there was a lot of duplication in my HTML files. As a side note, I was trying to build this in the easiest, lightest-weight possible way. That meant no ASP.NET MVC or anything else. To help keep me honest, I left this hosted on Linux. I could use something like Server Side Includes…

Nah.

When I had originally played with the version of Bootstrap on GitHub, there was mention of a tool called Jekyll. I hadn’t really looked at it before, but I decided to check it out. I had also seen it mentioned in some searches I had done about lightweight or minimalist blog engines.

So, more tools to get running. I already had Ruby, which meant that getting Jekyll running wasn’t too hard, but there were a number of small issues that kept me busy. The Jekyll documentation was pretty good, but I still had to search around a bit for solutions to some problems.

I could have chosen something like WordPress to host my site, and it would have been easier. However, I’m glad I took the time to learn Bootstrap and Jekyll.

I will post this site on GitHub as an example later, but for now, look at some of the sample sites that Jekyll references.

So, to recap, here’s what to do: