Jekyll Is Pretty Awesome

Okay, so a little testing with Jekyll has taught me a few things……

  • 1 Making an independent theme for a subproject (aka: generating CSS separate from my current theme): Difficult
  • 2 Customizing the basic Jekyll-baked theme: Intermediate
  • 3 Adding new posts: Super-Easy
  • 4 Learning the kramdown version of Markdown: Haven’t bothered
  • 5 I like ice cream

Nope, I’m lying. I already knew I liked ice cream.

I will note that I tried three different pre-baked Jekyll themes and many of them required a good deal of Jekyll functionality just simply not supported by Git-Bash on Windows (specifically, Windows 10).

A New Direction

Why am I on Windows, you ask?

Testing. To make a cross-platform learning environment means working cross-platform.

Thus, instead of recommending, for example, iTerm2 and a whole massive customization build with Oh My Zsh, zsh, etc., I will instead look at including that level of Power-User customization within an Appendix.

I still firmly believe that Drupal Content Authors, Front-End Developers, Back-End Developers, etc. will have the best experience on an up-to-date OSX or Linux OS, but many n00bs only have (and are only familiar with) Windows machines. It is what they grew up with at school, it is what they were trained on, and, most likely, what they took early Web Authoring classes on.

That’s not to say that the n00b’s Guide will change fundamentally. With the opportunities allowed by Git Branching, I may simply create a Branch-Structure like this:

--
  |_ 7.x-0.x-dev
  |_ 7.x-0.x-dev_windows
  |_ 7.x-0.x-dev_osx
  |_ 7.x-0.x-dev_linux

… and include all three operating systems.

I will need to decide at a later date if that is a viable route, because, with only a little thought on the topic, this is an extremely ambitious endeavor which can end very badly.

Along the way, however, I intend to explore different technologies that may/will allow for cross-functional Development, such as Jeff Geerling’s Drupal VM.

IF… or perhaps, more truthfully, WHEN a cross-functional Development platform that is stable on Windows arises, expect me to blog about it here (after taking it for a test run).

As a side-note here, the Drupal VM does work in Windows, and actually tends to work well, but pretty much requires a Quad-Core processor and at least 8gb of RAM. This means a knowledgeable user can build an actual Virtual Machine, then load up the Drupal VM (Ansible and all) headlessly within the Virtual Machine.

For example, Phase2’s new project DevTools sounds like a great Docker-machine project, but requires development on either a Linux or a Mac.

Look me up

“No man is an island.” ~ John Donne (1624)

If there’s a mistake, let me know. If I can make it better, let me know.

Thoughts, recommendations, good recipes for cooking pumpkin:

Twitter - @c_leverington github - cleverington d.o - cleverington