Davis McGregor's personal website

This repository contains the contents for a website powered by Jekyll and Minimal Mistakes, and is served on Github Pages. It can also be generated and served outside github by generating the website with jekyll (usually by running jekyll build) and copying it into a static website host (like Github Pages or Amazon S3)

Jekyll

From Jekyll docs:

Jekyll is a static site generator. You give it text written in your favorite markup language, and it uses layouts to create a static website. You can tweak how you want the site URLs to look, what data gets displayed on the site, and more.

Important Note: Any tweaks to _config.yml needs a jekyll restart since it jekyll does not reload when this file changes (basically because input and output are defined on that file)

Local spin-up

To test out changes locally, just run bundle exec jekyll serve Then navigate to localhost:4000 and you should be able to see the static website.

Themes

Jekyll's themes can be used to customize the look and feel of a Jekyll site. Github Pages supports some bundled themes as well as external themes.

I use a customized version of the Minimal Mistakes theme. Minimal Mistakes documentation and examples can be found here.

Plugins

Several plugins have been applied to jekyll, most of them to have extra liquid tags available, like {% gist <gist_id> %}, <% figure %> and others. Refer to Jekyll or Minimal Mistakes documentation for additional information.

Kramdown

Minimal Mistakes ships with some utility classes to help format posts and pages. Refer to Utility Classes for additional information.

Front Matter

The front matter is a section in the beginning of a book. The front matter in a book consists of: the title page (which includes copyright information, the ISBN, etc.), the dedication, the epigraph, table of contents, acknowledgements, the foreword, the preface, the introduction, and the prologue.

Jekyll uses front matter yaml blocks to customize or add content to pages and posts, among others:

---
title: How to add front matter to a page
date: 2001-12-01
excerpt: >-
   This is a multiline value
   that spawns several lines
   until a new attribute is found
categories:
  - How To
custom:
    var: custom var
---

{{ custom.var }} 

As seen above, Jekyll exposes front matter variables as liquid variables to use them in the content.

Website Contents

My website contains several Pages and Posts.

Pages are added manually to navigation, and appear at the top of the webpage. These are the main destinations that outline my work and interests.

Posts feature interesting articles or content that I find relavent to my field. Minimal Mistakes provides a default integration for posts. The homepage shows the last N posts and a slick pagination. There are also landing pages for posts to sort them chronologically, by categories, and by tags.

Jekyll indexes pages and posts and both appear on Search results.

Shortcuts

Some front matter shortcuts:

variable	usage	example
classes	additional style classes fo the layout	classes: wide makes the post to use entire page wide
toc	include table of content	toc: true adds a toc to right side (or top of post/page if classes: wide are used)
		toc_sticky: true keeps the toc floating on right
categories	add post / page to one or more categories
tags	add post / page to one or more tags
excerpt:	adds an excerpt to be displayed on RSS / collections / seo	excerpt: >- ... (multiline excerpt)
layout:	defines the layout for the page / post	layout: post

See Jekyll Front Matter and Minimal Mistakes Defaults.

Layouts

See Minimal Mistakes Layouts

Navigation Bar

Edit _data/navigation.yml as instructed on Minimal Mistakes

Icons and Favicon

Favicon was generated with real favicon generator.

Header (_includes/head/custom.html) contains favicon based on the above generator output.

Social Media links

Social media links are added on the footer and author via _config.yml

Getting Started

• See Jekyll guide
• Install Ruby for Windows. Select a Ruby+Devkit version
• Install Jekyll and Bundler with gem install jekyll bundler
• Ensure Jekyll installed properly jekyll -v
• Run bundle update to clear any dependency issues
• Try to spin up a local site bundle exec jekyll serve and browse to http://localhost:4000