About the Site

The main implementation is a Jekyll app powered by, and served from, GitHub Pages.

Workflow

1. I commit blog entries and other pages in Markdown, which is automatically translated into HTML by Jekyll.
2. I push the entries (just the Markdown) to my GitHub repo.
3. GitHub runs the Jekyll engine for me, generating HTML from the Markdown.

I used to run a Jekyll instance on Heroku, but got tired of updating Jekyll myself, so I decided to let GitHub manage it.

Technologies

Jekyll is “pure” Ruby, not Rails, so there’s no builtin asset pipeline. GitHub manages it for me, generating Sass as necessary. (When I was hosting on Heroku, I added an asset pipeline with the jekyll-assets gem.)

GitHub Pages uses kramdown (one of Jekyll’s alternative HTML translators) to replace Jekyll’s default, Maruku.

Thoughtbot’s libraries Bourbon and Neat provide responsive layout.

Default CSS provided by Thoughtbot’s Bitters because Bourbon, Neat needs a dash of Bitters.

The RSS feed is served directly from within GitHub (no need for FeedBurner etc. yet) via feed.xml from snaptortise’s Jekyll RSS Feed Templates.

(When I was hosted on Heroku, log management was handled by Logentries. GitHub error messages are pretty sparse; I need to find a replacement.)

Comments handled by Disqus.

I considered migrating off of Pygments (for code syntax highlighting) to CodeRay, but the latter didn’t highlight SCSS the last time I checked, so I stuck with Pygments.