The problem with these "I made this X in 5 minutes" announcements is that frequently, it <i>looks</i> like you made it in five minutes (and I don't mean that in a good way). This phrasing " I did X in Y time" is obviously meant to highlight one's skill and speed, but if the product looks crappy, the forest is missed for the trees.<p>I think this is a neat collection of frontend tools to make your Jekyll (or other static) blog snazzy. It's a good article in that respect: "Here are all the tools you need for a full featured Jekyll blog." But making the point of it being a "fast setup", as someone else pointed out, is a weak point, since wordpress and others are just as fast or faster.
First of all, I <i>hate</i> the "here is my weekend project I created in x seconds/minutes/days", <i>but</i> I consider the title of this post to be an ellipsis: "How I built my blog in one day <i>and you can too!</i>".<p>If you click on the link, you'll see that it's a project that is not there to promote the submitter nor stroke their ego, but to help other people simplify something many find to be tedious and difficult - and in an incredibly well-presented way.<p>I know about the Twitter Bootstrap like everyone and their dog, but I only see articles of praise rather than articles that praise by showing instead of telling through a guide and demonstrating the result in the form of the site itself.<p>Well done. This is the best article I have seen on Twitter Bootstrap.
How I built my blog in one day:<p>Sat down with Go, wrote a web handler (they already have http support). Added code to parse a tree of directories containing blog posts. Write markdown code in individual files in those directories. Blog code reads the markdown, parses it, and inserts it into a template. Add Disqus to taste and serve.<p>Final step: don't submit it to hacker news, profit :)
I did something similar last week -- you should invest in theming your site away from the default bootstrappy look/feel. Also it would be helpful to add details some more details about applying/switching themes and perhaps mention customizing the page lists used in navigation via declaring pages in a defined group in the YAML front-matter of a page and iterating over them in your layout's default.html.
Ignoring the Bootstrap aspect, I don't really see the need to explain how you added the Twitter/G+/Reddit buttons. I mean, they're just a script you copy and paste from the websites.<p>On the other hand, the dynamic Repo/Followers count was a nice touch. Didn't know about that one.
thanks for this. one barrier for me is that it is a requirement for the code snippets to render nicely in google reader, but this can probably be solved by using markdown instead of gists. another barrier is that i can't write special code, like a vanity url redirector, to keep my SEO juice when content moves, but maybe this is not so big an issue as i originally thought it was.<p>what is your draft management workflow like? this is important to me too, more important in fact than optimizing for people to actually read the blog, because if draft management sucks then i don't blog enough to get readers.
I searched high-and-low for a way to make sense of Jekyll for anything other than a blog. It nearly drove me mad. I ended up abandoning the idea of hosting notes on github as a website, and ended up cramming content into HTML manually.
I also built mine with same version of jekyll that github is using since I want to host my site in github pages however the build is broken when I commit a post that has {% raw %} tag. So I cant write a post with that tag anymore.
Thanks for the post, Eric. I found it very useful. I wasn't aware of Jekyll, so it was great to discover that you could survive just fine in 2012 without a DB. Time to migrate from Wordpress.
I'm a big fan of octopress, which is essentially Jekyll + themes + social media + generation and deploy scripts. Octopress includes good documentation and has been easy to use with Github.
I have been learning rails and had a similar project idea of developing a blog creator using this framework, but you have bet me to it! Now, I have to look for another idea. :)
Here's how to make a blog in 10 minutes!<p>1. git clone git://github.com/erjjones/erjjones.github.com.git
2. Delete posts, write posts, push to your own repo.
I'm using Jekyll bootstrap too, mostly as a way to get acquainted with Jekyll....however, for any new blogger, I think they'd do better to just do Wordpress at first