Show Notes
We've been having great fun in Programming By Stealth learning how to use Jekyll to create a website using GitHub Pages. This week Bart goes through the challenge he left us with last time — to add a nav bar to our little static website using Bootstrap 5 along with Jekyll and Liquid templates. Bart had a lot of fun with his solution so it was fun to hear him dust off the cobwebs on Bootstrap.
Then we turn to learning about Jekyll's `includes` feature, which is reusable snippets similar to how TextExpander snippets let you write something and change it in only one place. The worked examples simplify the code in a way, and we learn how to use `includes` to create advanced image markup.
I also enjoyed learning about Liquid comments and how you can create white space between sections of your code for ease of writing and debugging that then never show up in the resultant HTML.
More from Programming By Stealth
We dust off our memory from where we left off learning about Jekyll back in PBS 181 in June of last year. After some housekeeping, Bart takes us through the challenge solution from PBS 181, and then teaches us how to add metadata to our static sites. After the new material, he sets up where we're going next in learning how to organize our content with Jekyll taxonomies. He even explains what the weird term "information architecture" means in this context.
In this final episode of Tidbit 19, Bart walks us through the very few libraries he used for the final design of his Linkifier CLI App. His choices on tooling to build nice terminal commands and provide color in the terminal (like red for error messages) were based on simplicity, the fewest dependencies, and active support. It was a very fun episode to record as he wrapped the entire story up in a bow.
We're back with Part B of Tidbit 19, where Bart walks us through the architecture of his Linkifier module. He starts with the three data modeling classes that he's been using for decades, but explains how hard it is today to extract article headlines. He walks through how he developed an extraction logic but had to do it per domain. That sounds crazy but he uses surprisingly few sites for his articles for Security Bits and Let's Talk Apple.
In Part A of Tidbit 19, Bart explains the problem he needed to solve, which was bringing a script he's written up into the modern age as a JavaScript command-line interface app that can help navigate the AI landscape. As always, his explanation is geared towards teaching us the fundamentals with his problem as the example.
One of the things that helps your posts get traction is if you have a nice, pretty card that displays when you post the URL on social media. Plain blue links just don't get clicked. With WordPress and other dynamic Content Management Systems (CMSs), you can get plugins to create the pretty cards. But with Jekyll (and Hugo and other Static Site Generators), you need to build the capability into your theme. It's not hard, you just need to know what metadata to build, and of course, Bart is here to teach it to us.