page.title

BRINKERWEBDESIGN.COM

I wanted a lightweight site with with the ability to theme styles efficiently, update content or blog posts quickly, and avoid the pitfalls that come with maintaining a full LAMP application like Wordpress or Drupal.

After mulling around the idea of using Angular and Symfony, I decided the PHP framework and JS dependencies would still be too much footprint for my needs, and a pure static site would just not scale easily if I decided to expand in the future.

I finally decided on building a custom Jekyll site. No database, and no framework exploits to be patched. Rapid deployment straight through git. Liquid templates. Markdown content creation. Blog aware semantic permalinks. Simple static content generation. Perfect for my portfolio and blog!

Jekyll Blog Aware Static Site Generator

I’m a big fan of using generators and scaffolds to save time. After sifting through a few options, I found a Yeoman Generator @ https://github.com/sondr3/generator-jekyllized

Yeoman Generator

Creating a project required a few simple dependencies (most of which are already globally installed on my development environment rigs anyways)

  • Ruby
  • Bundler
  • Node
  • Yo
  • Gulp

After that, scaffolding out a base project was a breeze.

~ $ npm install 
~ $ bundle install

From there, some tweaks to the YAML configuration to accept custom collections for portfolio objects, liquid template creation, SCSS stylesheet preprocessing, and Git version control with Gulp deployments!

Credit to https://github.com/LeaVerou/css3patterns for CSS background pattern snippets ######Credit to https://github.com/LeaVerou/css3patterns for CSS background pattern snippets

Such an elegant and rapid process. With all the freedom and scalability I need.