Info
Site Credits
Tools
The site consists entirely of static pages created using the Jekyll] Static Site Generator. Development work is carried out a Mini-PC running Pop!OS, for text editing I use IntelliJ Idea from JetBrains with the IdeaVim(*) plugin and a colour theme that I can’t seem to settle on and changes every few weeks.
(*) The first editor I learned to use, some 40 years ago, was Vi and the muscle memory is too ingrained to change now!
The build system is the Linux ‘make’ command with some embedded bash scripts to do things like thumbnail generation.
The page theme is FEELING RESPONSIVE by phlow.
For articles and general topic pages images, diagrams, photographs etc. are my own work unless otherwise stated. I use the various tools provided by Affinity Software for image preparation and diagram creation.
For the reviews images are generally taken from the usual sources - amazon.com, imdb.com, youtube.com or the sites of the various studios or publishers. I haven’t provided individual attribution for these, sorry, but life is short and I’m sure that the organisations involved are big enough to handle the unintended copyright violations.
Hosting
As above, development work is done on my Pop!OS Linux Mini-PC which hosts multiple test versions of my various websites each on a different IP addresses.
The live website is hosted by Amazon Web Services on a tiny LightSail instance but since it is only static pages both performance and storage are adequate.
File Organisation
(The following information is largely for my own use and unlikely to very interesting to anyone else)
Articles
Created under blog/_posts, using the article template. Articles have no header image so add as required using ‘include figure’ in the body. You can provide a thumbnail with ‘thumb: file.jpg’ in the front matter, this will be looked for in /img/blog. A fall back is provided if required.
Reviews
Created in the reviews/<category>/_posts folder using the reviews template. Header image is added automatically based on the post slug, just put it in /img/reviews/<category>/ with a name that matches the slug and ends in .jpg. Thumbnails are generated automatically. A fall back image is provided if required.
The naming convention is that we use the full name of the item being reviewed using dashes instead of spaces but removing any initial “a-“ or “the-“. TVshows shoule have -sN appended, where N is the number of the season.
Frontmatter should be as follows:
- layout: review
- title: Full title, including ‘a’ or ‘the’
- author: (Books only) key-to-_data/authors.yml
- subheadline:
- For books, free format author name (ignored if the author field is present)
- For movies & tv shows, the streaming platform and / or studio
- For shorts, the full date range as text
- For games, the platform
- For other, free form explanation
- teaser:
- For books, the series (if any)
- For movies, the series (if any)
- For tvshows, the season (if any)
- For games / other, free form as required
- tags: as required
- category: one of tvshows / movies / other / books / shorts / games
(This last should be redundant but it simplifies the pagination)
Other Pages
Created in an appropriately named folder under pages, you can have any organisation that you like but need to provide the permalink in the frontmatter and your own navigation; either by manually including links or defining your own layout in _layouts. Additionally you will need top level links to your new pages in _data/navigation.html, usually under ‘Projects’ or ‘Interests’.
All contents are automatically included in the search index.
Comments are disabled unless you put comments: true in the front matter of each page, or in the defaults section of the _config.yml file.