

How I built my blog in one day - erjjones
http://erjjones.github.com/blog/How-I-built-my-blog-in-one-day/

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sequoia
The problem with these "I made this X in 5 minutes" announcements is that
frequently, it _looks_ 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.

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.

~~~
jenius
I couldn't agree more and was about to make a comment like this. Bootstrap
does not mean that you don't need a designer or time to think about UX, and it
makes me ill to see all these sites coming out with no thought put into design
or ux that are boostrapped and they say "hey look how great this is, and how
fast I made it!"

Straight up default bootstrap is even worse in my eyes than craigslist style
css. It's overused, and it's not enough to impress anymore. Take 6 more days,
talk to a designer, and make this a real blog.

~~~
camerondaigle
FWIW, I tell most developers I know to not stress out about their personal
blog design and just focus on the value of content. The vast majority of
default/built-in blog layouts are just fine. You're not a designer, you're not
seeking to show off your design chops with a custom layout – just write good
articles.

That said, this particular sort of design where it's not a standard blog theme
and not a custom design, but is just tweaked Bootstrap just seems neither here
nor there.

~~~
nollidge
That's true to some extent, but I think it's worth to throw in a couple
personalizations to avoid looking totally cookie-cutter.

I think most readers would be OK seeing something looking bootstrappy, but not
with something that is pure unmodified boostrap.

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kmfrk
First of all, I _hate_ the "here is my weekend project I created in x
seconds/minutes/days", _but_ I consider the title of this post to be an
ellipsis: "How I built my blog in one day _and you can too!_ ".

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.

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.

Well done. This is the best article I have seen on Twitter Bootstrap.

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kingsidharth
Or you could just install wordpress? Unless your aim is to jump through the
hoops, or satisfy the nerdy carving of coding we all have.

~~~
methoddk
Wordpress requires a database, Jekyll does not.

Jekyll is also much easier to maintain, with it's built in web server for
testing, and static page generation, using a github repo is so simple it's
stupid.

Jekyll is the way to go.

~~~
kingsidharth
I don't remember every having to deal with database after installation. And
with most host nowadays, it's sort of auto-managed.

Update with wordpress is a click-away.

I've seen much difference between two when it comes to maintaing, having to
touch databases etc.

~~~
_delirium
Judging by the number of Wordpress blogs that become unresponsive when they
hit the front page of HN, it doesn't seem like it's too easy to keep them
running with any traffic (or at least, people seem not to be doing it).

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jff
How I built my blog in one day:

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.

Final step: don't submit it to hacker news, profit :)

~~~
seclorum
I'd be interested in seeing that Go code ..

~~~
jff
It's only been tested on Plan 9, with an older version of Go, but you can
check out the code at <https://bitbucket.org/floren/goblog>

It's not as nice as it could be, but I'm pretty happy with how it works.

~~~
seclorum
Thanks for that - as a new learner of Go, its definitely nice to have
something interesting to read. Oh, and the fact that you're a Plan9 user
making use of Go: awesome! :)

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freestyler
Great, Another Bootstrap Site :)

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nololno
what the hell is up with all the WE WROTE OUR WIDGET IN 18 HOURS crap

do it right, nobody gives a shit how fast you achieved mediocrity

~~~
zalew
I'm actually surprised how it took a whole day to set up a blog on bootstrap
html with no custom styling. yawn

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steele
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.

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envex
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.

On the other hand, the dynamic Repo/Followers count was a nice touch. Didn't
know about that one.

~~~
erjjones
Agreed. It is a lame explanation for sure. I thought I would aggregate
everything in one place whether it was easy or hard. Thanks for the feed back.

~~~
envex
No problem. It would make a person who wanted to do exactly the same thing
with 0 knowledges life a lot easier, but on the other hand I don't think
someone like that would be using Jekyll.

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dustingetz
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.

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.

~~~
amirmc
What do you mean by 'workflow'?

I've been writing on a github pages-based blog and I dump all draft blog posts
into a _wip folder. They get version controlled like any other file and I can
add the YAML and move them into the _posts folder when I'm ready to publish.

Edit: Since I've been posting on that blog, I've decided to move my personal
one to GitHub pages too. When posting is as simple as pushing a file it
becomes easier to focus on writing. The only reasons I haven't switched are
(1) extracting content from my old provider and (2) theming and set up for the
new one.

~~~
dustingetz
what tools do you use to edit? i loved using google wave to manage my drafts,
and i haven't really recovered from that - i use google docs now but there's
no great way to extract content from that in a way that will be fragile to
changes in factors outside my control.

~~~
amirmc
Ah, now I see what you were getting at.

I just use plain text files and my current editor of choice is Sublime Text 2
(really like the full screen mode). I write in markdown and if I really want
to 'preview' it I open a copy of the file in Coda, where Ive installed a
plugin for this purpose. That's pretty much all I need.

The remaining barriers to writing are non-technical (e.g. time, will, etc)

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bdg
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.

~~~
PhilipMallory
Vagrant's online documentation is done with Jekyll, the idea being that it's
very easy for contributors to edit content and view their changes.

<http://vagrantup.com/docs/index.html>

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ronbeltran
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.

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akurilin
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.

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liamk
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.

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QuarkSpark
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. :)

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embwbam
Here's how to make a blog in 10 minutes!

1\. git clone git://github.com/erjjones/erjjones.github.com.git 2\. Delete
posts, write posts, push to your own repo.

~~~
embwbam
Update: I didn't know about octopress. much better.

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zoobert
I like the blog style and the bootstrap use. Good job

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danso
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

