Programming By Stealth

In this episode, Bart continues teaching us about GitHub Pages using Jekyll by introducing us to Liquid Templates. Liquid allows us to move from adding static content to our web pages to auto-generated information. It's a lot for one lesson, and some of the terminology is a little weird, but as always, Bart's worked example brings it home. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net [https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs179].

In this tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots and Helma van der Linden start by reviewing how she took the reins of the XKPasswd project to first convert it from Perl to JavaScript, then to rewrite the web app. After that, she separated the JavaScript library from the web app code. This episode is primarily walking through exactly how she accomplished that split. And now XKPasswd is officially out of beta and available at xkpasswd.net [https://www.xkpasswd.net] You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net [https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbshttps://pbs.bartificer.net/tidbit12].

Last time we learned how to install Ruby, install Bundler, install Gems, and build a very simple website using Jekyll as our static site generator into GitHub. In this installment of our Jekyll miniseries, Bart explains Jekyll's build process which is mostly automated by how you name things and the content of the files you create (like adding YAML front matter.) Then we spend some quality time bemoaning how the Jekyll developers reuse the word "assets" to mean two different things. Bart avoids some of the associated confusion by creating some naming conventions of our own. We get to do a worked example where we learn a little bit about Pages in Jekyll and do a few things the hard way that we'll redo the easy way in the coming installments. If you're following along realtime, note that we won't be recording for 6 weeks because of some birthdays and Allison's trip to Japan.

In our miniseries on GitHub Pages, we learn how to create a basic Jekyll site. To do this, we must install a modern version of Ruby, install its Gem Bundler, create a little placeholder site, and then serve Jekyll to view our site locally. We push it to GitHub where the GitHub Actions we learned about last time do their magic and create a real website all for free. But we didn't stop there. One of our goals is to create our own theme, and to build on what we get with Bootstrap. We actually download the source, not compiled version of Bootstrap and pick and choose the files we want to use. While learning about the standard conventions for directory structure in Jekyll sites, we'll also learn about Sass — Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets — and how Jekyll will turn them into standard CSS. It's a bit of a heavy lift in terms of a lot of moving pieces, but no one bit of this was hard to learn. It was great fun, and this is just the beginning of what we're going to learn about using Jekyll as a fully-functional content management system.

Way back in September of 2022, Bart finished off the Webpack miniseries by leaving it as an exercise for the student to deploy their web apps to GitHub Pages. Bart closes that circle in this installment while teaching us how to use GitHub Actions. We learn about workflows, jobs, steps, events, and runners. Bart includes great tables in the shownotes of the terminology, so we now have a handy reference guide for making our own YAML files to run GitHub actions. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net [https://pbs.bartificer.net/pbs176]. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_15 [https://podfeet.com/transcripts/PBS_2025_02_15.html] Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack [https://podfeet.com/slack] and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie [https://lets-talk.ie/] and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: * Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me [https://podfeet.com/parallelstoolbox] * Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me [https://podfeet.com/macsparky] * Backblaze - One free month for me and you [https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01zmio] * Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. [https://share.eufylife.com/v1/shopping/s/g/e-GkwxRA-] * PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us [https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/buy-a-vpn/1218buyavpn?invite=U2FsdGVkX182XdJGIOFG6t8UZUmK_QY_fyujdZB6ekM%2C0CVvGHU-flt21G9A5Nj-fL1Yet0] * CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude [https://cleanshot.sjv.io/4P249n]