Generated by Jekyll & Open Source Plugins
I’ve spent my free time over the past week replacing my existing site with this new, Jekyll generated site and I couldn’t be happier with how it came out. Jekyll, written by GitHub’s Tom Preston-Werner, is an extremely extendible static site generator. While developing my new site, which is hosted in an S3 bucket on Amazon, I ended up implementing a couple of simple plugins that I’ve opened sourced in hopes that others may find them useful. If you’d like to see the entire source of this site, check out the GitHub repository and if you’d like to learn more about my plugins, keep reading.
AliasGenerator
This generator looks through the YAML Front Matter of each post and generates redirect pages when an alias configuration is set. I found this plugin necessary when migrating my existing posts on tumblr to a more sane url structure.
Example Configuration:
This alias is set on my “How I Keep Limited Pressing Running” article which was originally published at tumblr and will redirect anyone going to the old address.
FlickrSetTag
This tag generates a simple image gallery from a set of photos on Flickr.
Example Usage:
This will result in a bit of generated html displaying thumbnails of each photo in the set. Check the repository’s README for configuration details.
More About Plugins
Although there are a decent amount of plugins already available for Jekyll, like me, you may not find the exact plugin to suit your needs. Luckily, Jekyll makes it pretty straightforward to write your own. I highly suggest picking out a few interesting plugins and reading through the source and understanding how they work.