Something new
Part of being a professor in the web design field means that you have to be prepared when the inevitable moment comes; a student ask you if you know about X. X of course being that latest and greatest movement in our industry: CSS Grid and Flex, the latest IDE, or animating gradients for a sampling.
Now of course as a prof we have all the time in the world to research and play with the latest, right? Unfortunately no. We find ourselves instead in a constant backlog of work, not to mention, as a part-time prof, I still have my day job, meaning free-time to play is simply not a reality.
With that said (and frankly out of the way), let’s get back to business. Even without extra play time, we still must find a way, so, welcome to my personal site project built with something pretty freakin’ cool: GitHub Pages and Jekyll.
GitHub Pages
Hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.
GitHub Pages allows you to build an entire flat file website from scratch, host on GitHub for FREE (what?!), and even configure SASS to auto precompile.
Not to mention, it is crazy fast, supports HTTPS, and lets you use your own domain. Nuts right?
Disclaimer: I am working on a vid tutorial for this in the future, so stay tuned
Jekyll
Where things get even more badass is Jekyll (Quick-start Guide). Jekyll is a static website generator powered by Markdown or Textile, Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JS.
With Jekyll you can easily create includes for things like navigation, headers and footers, run a blog, and, using Markdown, quickly and easily write content!
Where to go from here
Realizing that yes, this site right now is completely underwhelming looking (just literally started it), the next step is to make it better looking (planning a slick 80s graphics theme).
For now, stay trendy,
Chris