In the August 15 meeting one of the topics was static site generators. We discussed what it would take to implement belug.us or something similar using a static site generator. As an exercise/demonstration, I created a site similar to belug.us using jekyll. I did this by forking jekyll/minima as belug.us and editing it until I was happy with the results.

The following steps resulted in a site resembling the belug.us site.

  • Clone repo to belug.us (on local machine). Run jekyll server to monitor changes along the way.
  • Change site name in _config.yml file to “Bellevue Linux Users Group”
  • Change index.md layout (in front matter) from home layout to page layout. This gets blog posts off of front page.
  • Create about.md, faq.md and meetings.md as copies of about.md. Change title and permalink in frontmatter. Add both to _config.yml
  • Cut and pasted content from belug.us to the appropriate markdown files (index.md, about.md, faq.md & meetings.md).
  • Add screen.css (downloaded from belug.us site) to _sass directory as screen.sccs. Include this file from minima/custom-styles.scss
  • Add images bg_large.jpg and bg_grad.png (downloaded from belug.us site) to assets/img directory.
  • Introduce two new divs in _layouts/base.html with class “content” and class “container” . These classes are referenced from screen.css. With these divs in place, the site starts to look like belug.us
  • Other minor adjustments to markdown and css to improve look & feel.
  • Added _data/meetings.yml to hold meeting dates.

You can see the resulting page here. It’s not identical to belug.us but it’s pretty close. Most of the content is contained in these four markdown (and one data) files:

My intention for this demo was to minimize changes made after cloning the jekyll/minima repository so I left some content in the repository that could be deleted.