Designing and building a blog in two days
The task of building a Topguest blog has been in our backlog for a while. Thanks to a handful of great open-source tools we were able to bite the bullet and get one out the door in a matter of days.
In the past I’ve designed and built blogs with excellent platforms like Wordpress, and Symphony CMS, but building and integrating custom templates (along with removing or adapting functionality) is a process likely to take weeks, not days. Both also require a database and this must be factored into any deployment process.
We simply wanted a place to share stories and resources and decided that with straightforward requirements Jekyll would do the job. Jekyll is a static site generator built in Ruby which runs a simple templating system through Textile, Markdown and Liquid convertors outputting a static (and super-fast serving) website.
Keeping our restraints in mind my production process went something like this:
Half day: Designing layouts and templates in Photoshop.
Half day: Set up a Github Pages repo (Github will host your blog for free and you can deploy in one push command), pushing HTML/CSS templates with the help of HTML5 Boilerplate, SASS (allows me to easily re-use core Topguest styles) and 960GS.
Half day: Integrating Jekyll’s templating system and making use of Liquid.
Half day: Getting the Topguest team to contribute content by pulling and pushing to our Github repo.
The beauty of the whole process was that it leveraged the tools I (and any self-respecting web designer) use every day – a text editor (Textmate, I love you) and Git. I found that Jekyll and Liquid had almost no entrance barriers so I wasted no time learning a new framework, hunting around documentation or looking for libraries and plug-ins. I was also able to design and build completely custom templates without the friction that can come along with a more fleshed-out framework.
This workflow requires that your authors be comfortable enough at the command line to pull, add, and push with Git. It suits a small tech start-up like us perfectly, but countless roles and professions could benefit from an hour or so of Git training. It means content is backed up and versioned throughly and we also think it would be awesome to accept pull requests from guest contributors on Github.
If you’re hacking around with location-based services or thinking about how the travel industry could best use social media, you should consider writing a guest post. We’d love for you to join the conversation, and hope that we can give your work some additional exposure. It would also be a great way to get our attention if you’re looking to land a job at Topguest.
Any questions, drop me a line.
