SimplePrimate

Welcome to my Simple Primate blog relaunch! Around 2007 I started this blog as a way to connect with my students at Lodestone, discuss my speaking engagements, and promote my ever-growing catalog of courses on lynda.com. Shortly after starting it I made a change and became a full-time author at lynda. Unfortunately changing my focus had an almost immediate effect on my blog, which went dormant. I should have channeled even more energy into the blog and used it to supplement my courses, including all the details that I couldn’t fit into them. Truthfully though after a full day of writing for my courses I very rarely felt like firing the code editor back up and blogging. I also became very frustrated with WordPress. Unlike my friend Morten, I found it tedious to make minor edits and didn’t feel like becoming a WordPress developer just to build my blog the way I wanted to. read more

Once you’ve finished building your Jekyll site you’ll need to decide where and how you want to deploy it. Since Jekyll builds static content you can serve it almost anywhere. There are no server-side dependencies, CMS installations, database administrators, or server stacks to worry about. If the server can handle HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it can serve your site. With that in mind let’s take a look at some of the most common options for deploying Jekyll sites. read more

One of my favorite things about Jekyll is how it gets out of the way and lets you, the designer, actually design. Jekyll imposes no type of structure or framework, no default classes, layout, or coding conventions. You’re free to structure and style your content as you see fit. As such how you plan and author your styles is entirely up to you. There are, however, a few things you want to keep in mind when writing CSS for a Jekyll site. read more

YAML front matter is perhaps the most important aspect of creating sites through Jekyll. It allows you to control how Jekyll processes and builds pages, create page-specific variables, and triggers file processing. Let’s take a closer look at front matter and how it can help you create more efficient Jekyll sites. read more