Getting Started

• Make sure you have Ruby, Node.js, and NPM installed. You need to install nodejs-grunt-cli.
• gem install bundler
• bundle install
• npm install

What is This Node.JS Stuff?

It's a way for us to manage our asset dependencies (namely, our CSS framework and JavaScript framework). If you're just developing content for the site, you don't need to worry about it.

For the asset libraries, we're using Bower which is invoked via Grunt. If you need to update the libraries, you'll make a change to the bower.json file and change the version number. Then run grunt. The default Grunt task will wipe the old dependencies and install the new ones under assets/vendor and bower_components. The assets/vendor files can be used directly. The files under bower_components are primarily for pre-processing and should not be pulled in directly. For example, the zargon.scss file includes a bunch of the Bulma Sass so we can use their mixins and variables if we want. You'll notice in _config.yaml that we're telling Jekyll to place bower_components/bulma on the Sass load path.

This Seems Overly Complicated!

Yes. But apparently this is how The Internet has decided to do web development now. We could do this via a Rakefile but the only Rake integration I could find bolted a Rails-style asset pipeline onto Jekyll which is just as complicated (if not more so).

Writing Content

Create a file with a .md suffix. At the top add

---
title: My Title
layout: standard-page
---

That meta-data will tell Jekyll the title of your page and the page layout to use. Then just write your content using Markdown syntax.

Previewing the Site

Run bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload. Jekyll will render the site (into the _site directory) and start a webserver on localhost's port 4000. You can point a browser there and get a preview of the site. As a bonus the --livereload argument will watch the directory for changes. On any change, the site will be re-rendered and Jekyll will notify your browser to refresh itself.