Let's blog
08 Jan 2015"I should start a dev blog" was a thought I had for quite a while now, and finally it is time to fullfill it. Just so you know, new posts probably won't appear here too often or at regular intervals, but I wanted to have a place where I can ocassionaly write about some of mine projects and their progress. For the most of the time they will be games, as I'm very interested in game development, but sometimes I may write about web-dev or some other stuff. Who knows!
At the beggining though, I'll quickly show you some usefull materials on how to make a blog like this one.
After looking at various options I decided to create my blog on Github Pages as it seems like the perfect choice for hosting a simple website for free. You can host your Github Page from your repository, which gives a great controll over every change you make on a website.
For creating a blog specifically, the best choice I found is Jekyll, especially with Poole. They are quite easy to setup and understand. To create your own website with Poole you just have to clone their repository and push it to your own github.io respo. It's that simple!
I won't give you full tutorial on how to personalise your blog here. Instead, I'll link very usefull articles that I followed for this blog:
There are two notable changes I did to the information from above articles:
1. Alternative skin
Instead of using just plain Poole, I decided to use a skin for it called Lanyon. It looks pretty much te same, with an addition of this cool sliding sidebar on the left side of your screen. There is also a second layout, Hyde, with non-retractable sidebar, but I personally choose Lanyon over it. Also, the sidebars can be modified and personalised however you want it.
2. Post snippet
I didn't like the fact that on default Poole puts the whole content of posts on the main page, instead of just a snippet of it. So I decided to change it myself! Now, there is some information about it in one of the above articles, but I decided to do this a bit differently.
In my _config.yml I added this line:
excerpt_separator: "<!-- more -->"
This is my indicator where the 'snippet' part in an article ends.
Then, in index.html I changed the part where the whole post is displayed into this:
<div class="read-more">
<a class="read-more-link" href="">Read more...</a>
</div>
Now, whenever I put <!-- more --> in an article file, it will be divided in that place and a 'Read more' link to full article will appear.
That is basically everything you need to create your own simple blog!
This was a bit strange post to write for me, as I'm not used to giving tips about blogs, but hopefully next time I'll have something more interesting and fun for me to write about ;)
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