757rb.org Website Source

Our website is built using jekyll, a static website and blog generator written in Ruby. Our blog is hosted on GitHub using GitHub Pages. The repository that hosts the static site is different than this one but you never need to manually think about that. This repo does all the driving.

Setup

These steps rarely need to be done after your initial setup.

First, install some dependencies. Use MacPorts or Homebrew as desired. Also, our current required .ruby-version is 2.0.0, any patch version. We highly suggest using rbenv for installing ruby versions.

$ brew install optipng
$ bundle install

• The optipng binary is not required.
• The rsync binary. This is installed already on most POSIX systems. Used for deploy task.

Developing

After all things are installed, consult each file in the tasks directory for some development tips. Since we use Bundler bin stubs, make sure to have the local .bin folder is high in your $PATH. See rbenv's for recommendations.

Technology

We use the following technology along with jekyll.

• jekyll-assets - Enables the sprockets asset pipeline for jekyll.
• Sass - Sass makes CSS fun again!. We use the .scss format.
• Compass - The best Sass CSS framework ever!.
• companimation - Sass/Compass framework for Dan Eden's Animate.css.
• CoffeeScript - High level language which compiles down to JavaScript.
• jQuery.js - Latest and greates v2. So only IE 9 and up for us.
• jquery-cookie - A simple, lightweight jQuery plugin for reading, writing and deleting cookies.
• unveil.js - A very lightweight plugin to lazy load images for jQuery or Zepto.js
• plax.js - JQuery powered parallaxing

Server

We suggest using Pow to host the developent site. Using Pow means you do not have to start up a development server every time you want to work on 757rb.dev. We acheive Pow compatability by including a simple config.ru rackup file that serves all static content via a public directory symlink to the generated jekyll _site directory. Alternately you can use the jekyll serve command to boot up a temporary WEBrick server.

The jekyll server command has a built in --watch option so changes will automatically trigger a rebuild of the site. However, if you use Pow, we suggest investing in LiveReload. Point it to your 757rb.org-jekyll directory, turn off all compilation, then enable the "Run a custom command..." option. Set it to the run the jekyll-livereload shell script in the tasks directory of this repository.

Task Scripts

This folder contains a few usefull bash shell scripts that make working on our site more enjoyable. Run them in the command line by just typing ./tasks/name where name could be any one of the following.

• jekyll - Build the site using jekyll.
• jekyll-livereload - Loads rbenv for LiveReload and builds the site using the above script.
• optipng - Find all PNG images in the _assets/images directory and compress the hell out of em!
• deploy - Build and deploys the site to our sister github repo.

Contribute & Deploy

Simple steps to contirbute and deploy updated code or posts.

• Work on the site.
• Commit and push your changes. Note, your commit message will be used for the deploy message.
• Run the ./tasks/deploy task.
• Profit!

License

Blog content and design are Copyright (c) 2013, 757.rb Norfolk, VA Ruby Users Group.