Developing the Site

Contents

• Setting up development environment
• Running the test site
• Documentation
• Important files

Notes for those who wish to change the behaviour or appearing of the site, and to run it on their own machine, to test changes.

These are mostly intended for those not familiar with developing static websites with Jekyll.

Setting up development environment

• Fork this repo
• Set up Jekyll
  • Where it says 'cd to myblog', instead 'cd to your copy of this repo'

Running the test site

cd include-cpp.github.io
bundle exec jekyll serve

Then open http://localhost:4000 in a browser.

Note that as you then edit the site and save changes, the site gets rebuilt, and you will usually be able to refresh your browser a second or two later, and immediately see the changes.

Changing the site configuration may require re-running bundle exec jekyll serve.

Documentation

The Minimal Mistakes Documentation is good.

Important files

Note: where sub-directories are mentioned in the links below, it's worth looking at all the other files in the same sub-directories.

• _config.yml
  • Settings that affect the entire site, things like the site URL, twitter account name
  • Changes to this file are not automatically reloaded in the test server
• _data/navigation.yml
  • The links that show in the menus at the top and sidebar
• _includes/footer.html
  • Changes the footer at the bottom of the screen
  • Perhaps the changes here should have gone in _includes/footer/custom.html
• _includes/head/custom.html
  • This is where our custom fonts are loaded
• _layouts/home.html
  • The layout of the front page
• _sass/minimal-mistakes/_variables.scss
  • Most style settings are controlled from here, things like colours, font sizes, etc