Although I haven’t posted much recently (sorry, got a couple of ideas I want to write about, but I’m taking ages to do it), I have been making some tweaks to the website. I really like Jekyll for this sort of development, it’s extremely flexible in the design and development stages but as it outputs static pages the site itself is lightening fast.

Although I took an available theme, I’ve made a few modifications and I wanted to document a few of them.

I’ve linked to the main commit responsible for each feature below, although there may have been more than one commit to actually get it right! :wink:

  1. I added the category pages, linked from the site header, with a little help from Christian Specht.
  2. I modified the link to point to the about page when on the homepage. Why waste a perfectly good link?
  3. I also added a Twitter widget, to add some live content to the site, when I haven’t updated for a while. I made that dynamic, so if I change my Twitter handle I only have to change it once for the site.
  4. I then re-ordered the social icons, I made the alphabetical in the config.yml file and just sorted them into a more logical order in the icons.html include file and adding title attributes. I also added an icon for Goodreads, although Font Awesome doesn’t have an official icon.
  5. I added Twitter card meta data to the default template to match the OpenGraph data that was already there.
  6. Last but not least I added Medium-style “time to read” to the header of each post with a little help from Carlos Becker which I think looks great.

Photo via VisualHunt.com