Posts in category 'indieweb'

Well, I must confess when I first agreed to take over maintenance of this plugin I wasn’t prepared for just how burned out I’d gotten at the time, so while I did manage to get 3.3.7 out the door, I have to admit progress was far slower than I would’ve liked.

But, version 4.0.0 is finally done, and I’ve managed to integrate a bunch of changes I had queued up while dealing with a bunch of open issues in the tracker.

Here’s hoping I didn’t break anything horribly (I dogfood the main branch on my own blog but I’m not going to claim that exercises every corner of the codebase, and I’ve not begun the monumental effort to close out issue #29, so automated tests are still very much absent).

With that said, version 4.0.0 of this plugin brings along a couple of major new features, along with some more minor enhancements. While the gem behaviour and associated configuration should be backward compatible with the 3.x series, the changes are significant enough that I felt it best to bump the major version of the plugin so folks are less likely to experience a surprise upgrade.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my blog is often both a place to throw ideas out into the world, and a place to mess around with screwy ideas, and one of those ideas I’ve been messing around with is using Jekyll’s abilities as a static site generator to produce multiple outputs from a single source.

The first experiment in this area involved my cookbook, wherein I took a bunch of individual markdown files and crammed them together into something that pandoc can use to generate PDF and even EPUB outputs.

My second experiment in this area was with my CV. The challenge with something like a CV is that the layout requirements are pretty complex and don’t fit well with a basic template-and-markdown model. As a result, I ended up having to take a less orthodox approach to this project.

Note: This was originally going to be a single post about both my Cookbook and my CV, but it turns out I can really ramble, so I’m splitting it into two posts.

One of the benefits of using a static site generator (in my case Jekyll) to build this website is that all the underlying content is stored in simple text files. Most of the page content itself is just markdown files with a YAML header block. The page layout is simple HTML templates using liquid macros. Formatting is SASS that’s transformed into vanilla CSS.

This has a few of benefits. First, the site is future-proofed–plain text means I can move to a different engine any time I want, as the content is stored in a format that’s easy to extract and transform. Second, the ecosystem of tools to handle text files generally, and YAML and markdown specifically, is enormous, which means I can lean on all that existing infrastructure to do interesting things.

In this post I’ll cover the first of two examples where I’ve taken advantage of these benefits to produce, not just this website, but beautiful PDFs, ebooks, and even Word documents, from the same source content.