Tom Finley's Personal Site

This is the Github pages repository for my private site, meant to be rendered using Jekyll. This is not meant to be publicly consumed through Github itself, except perhaps as an example (whether or positive or negative remains to be seen) of how to use Jekyll.

Notes on Development

These are primarily notes for myself, since I tend to keep my sites for a while. Greetings, future self! I hope you are still alive and well? In any case, just as a reminder:

This uses a static site generator called Jekyll. I am using a dev container as specified under Dockerfile, with VS Code as my primary editor. The means by which I set this up was through [Bill Raymond's tutorial][br] on this subject. (The tutorial is set up in such a way that it assumes that you are creating a totally fresh GitHub Pages site, but it is relatively easy to adapt.)

Anyway, if you are starting from a fresh computer:

1. In VS Code, using the Dev Containers extension, then choosing the "Dev Containers: Open Folder in Container..." This will process the Dockerfile and set up the minimal environment. I have not published the image on an image repository, in the hopes that gem is semi-reliable.
2. Once that remote is set up, in the VS Code terminal we can use bundle upgrade and suchlike to make sure everything is properly loaded.
3. Using the script to serve/update a local configuration can be fine. This will serve it on (in container) localhost on port 4000, which the container is configured to expose.

The Jekyll docs have information on Jekyll itself, with GitHub Pages specific information here. Questions can be posted here.

Custom Behavior

The postlist layout type in Jekyll seems to be optimized for blog-style content where recent content comes first. Adding a chronology: true to a post-list page instead makes earlier matter comes first, which makes sense if a reader would benefit from absorbing different posts in the order in which they appear.

The postlist layout type can have its ordering over-ridden by having each post have a priority value set in the post's YAML header. For instance, having priority: 10 in a post would make a post appear first above any posts with a priority value less than 10 or where the priority is unspecified. In such an instance the post list has a 📌 in the top level description.