The Constructors website

Made using Jekyll, Twitter Bootstrap and a Bootswatch theme.

Getting this thing up and running

Make sure you've got a recent Ruby and ImageMagick installed. Install pygments from pip. Then, run in the souce directory:

bundle

And to develop and/or write new blog posts:

bundle exec jekyll serve -w --drafts

That's all there is to it.

Writing blog posts

Blog posts reside in blog/_posts and drafts live in blog/_drafts. Drafts won't be published, posts will. So if you need to collaborate on a blog post; leave it a draft until it's finished. The naming convention is as follows:

blog/_drafts/name-of-post.EXT
blog/_posts/YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.EXT

Where EXT can either be html or md. Drafts don't have a fixed date. That's because the last modification date of the draft will function as that post's date.

The post itself has some YAML front matter:

---
title: The Title Of My Post
lang: en
author: joris
category: operations
image: spaghetti.jpg
attribution: poppet with a camera
---

• title: The title of your post.
• lang: The language of your post. Either nl or en.
• author: Your shortname, as defined in _data/constructors.yml.
• category: The name of the category, as defined in _data/blog.yml.
• image: Optional; the background image (more on that later).
• attribution: Optional; attribution for the background image. Otherwise public domain.

Blog post graphics

Every blog post can have a full screen graphic presented to the user. If disabled, the category color is used. To enable this, add the image tag to the YAML front matter with the name of the photo you've stored in img/blog/. Make sure you only use images that we can use commercially, like Creative Commons without the NC clause. The Creative Commons Search is a great source of images. Don't forget to properly add the attribution tag when required!

Because these photos are full screen, the resolution needs to be massive. We default on photos with a width of 1600px. Resize yours to fit. To make sure they won't hog people's internet connection, compress the photo by stripping lots of detail. JPEG quality of 75 with the chroma halved is a good idea. Also add progressive for a better user experience.

Afterwards you can create a thumbnail for the blog index by running:

bin/generate_thumbs.sh

Photo on the front page

The photo used on the front page is Creative Commons licensed. See the Flickr page for the license that applies.