I asked by big bro a few weeks/days (I can't remember exactly when) ago to help me update my blog. I wanted to reduce the amount of posts on the main page to only 1 or 2 most recent posts as I felt that it was getting cluttered and gave me no space to pretify it. I also wanted to organise my blog posts into categories to allow me to have seperate pages for them.
To whom ever is reading this blog, I can imagine that it's not a suprise that he told me to get learning figure it out and then document how I did it to teach otheres in the future, as the best way to learn is to teach.
So for a good while I did nothing. It felt all too daunting and impossible. But I wanted to add an about me page to my blog, which made my navigation bar even bigger and was starting to look stupid, and therefor now was the time to learn.
I'm going to be honest I have very little knowledge of what I am doing and a lot of googling happened for me to succeed in this venture. However, I have succeeded and my blog (if I do say so myself) is starting to look fabulous. Maybe I'll become a pro in this at some point in my life... Also, maybe not.
The first thing that I did was try and understand my index, which is the front page of my blog. I noticed that this page utilised paginators, so I googled this and after a few posts on stackoverflow came to the conclusion that paginators were for indexs only and that this would not work for another page. A paginator is something that is used in many websites to display lists of posts within pages. My blog is powered by Jekyll, and therefore uses the jekyll paginator plugin within my Gemfile.
But i did find a very useful blog that explained how to limit posts within paginators to however many I wanted, with the option of offsetting if I wanted to. I added this to my html page and boom I now only have 2 of my latest posts on my front page at one time. This in turn will give me option in the future to pritify by front page and add other content., rather than it just being a list of hyperlinks.
I did some research into liquid filters and jekyll collections, which I did try for my blog posts but had no joy at making a seperate page with these. But with futher searching I stumbled accross a post about Jekyll Tags which looked really promising. (The first thing I did do, when I read tags however, was go "oh I know what to do!" and literally just hashtag on my blogs. Clearly this didn't work and I did shout at myself for being such a twit... Needless to say you do actually have to read the information to know what to do and understand it!). So I created a layout called "tagpage" and then added a tag to each of my blogs. My layout included a for command that looked for site.tags along with liquid attributes for what I wanted to display and this allowed my to display all taged posts on one page in a simple layout by date order. However, it was just a list and didn't follow the same theme as the rest of my blog which was annoying. So I played about with merging the two layouts and found that it was merely the fact I had used layout default rather than layout post. Where layout default is just set up for text input, and layout post has been set up to stylize the page (not quite sure how this all works yet, but it did what I wanted it to do so that's good enough for now). So i changed that and it started to look more like something that would work.
The only thing was that I was unable to add my own text and pictures to the page, and it was purely just a list of blog entries. But nearly there. So i did a bit of research into pages and what I needed to do to allow me to input my own content and realised that i needed to add a content section to my layout itself, or I could write as much as I wanted but it would not show up.
Now I have a "latest 2" blog entries on my front page, and a seperate page for my blog posts depending on the category. It has taken my all morning, a good 4 hours to do these simple tasks. But I guess Rome wasn't built in a day.
There is so much more I want to learn, modify and create. But for today I think that's enough. Time to actually get dressed, eat something and maybe do some decorating (probably not, but I like to tell myself I will in hope that one day I will actually listen).
To whom ever is reading this blog, I can imagine that it's not a suprise that he told me to get learning figure it out and then document how I did it to teach otheres in the future, as the best way to learn is to teach.
So for a good while I did nothing. It felt all too daunting and impossible. But I wanted to add an about me page to my blog, which made my navigation bar even bigger and was starting to look stupid, and therefor now was the time to learn.
I'm going to be honest I have very little knowledge of what I am doing and a lot of googling happened for me to succeed in this venture. However, I have succeeded and my blog (if I do say so myself) is starting to look fabulous. Maybe I'll become a pro in this at some point in my life... Also, maybe not.
The first thing that I did was try and understand my index, which is the front page of my blog. I noticed that this page utilised paginators, so I googled this and after a few posts on stackoverflow came to the conclusion that paginators were for indexs only and that this would not work for another page. A paginator is something that is used in many websites to display lists of posts within pages. My blog is powered by Jekyll, and therefore uses the jekyll paginator plugin within my Gemfile.
But i did find a very useful blog that explained how to limit posts within paginators to however many I wanted, with the option of offsetting if I wanted to. I added this to my html page and boom I now only have 2 of my latest posts on my front page at one time. This in turn will give me option in the future to pritify by front page and add other content., rather than it just being a list of hyperlinks.
I did some research into liquid filters and jekyll collections, which I did try for my blog posts but had no joy at making a seperate page with these. But with futher searching I stumbled accross a post about Jekyll Tags which looked really promising. (The first thing I did do, when I read tags however, was go "oh I know what to do!" and literally just hashtag on my blogs. Clearly this didn't work and I did shout at myself for being such a twit... Needless to say you do actually have to read the information to know what to do and understand it!). So I created a layout called "tagpage" and then added a tag to each of my blogs. My layout included a for command that looked for site.tags along with liquid attributes for what I wanted to display and this allowed my to display all taged posts on one page in a simple layout by date order. However, it was just a list and didn't follow the same theme as the rest of my blog which was annoying. So I played about with merging the two layouts and found that it was merely the fact I had used layout default rather than layout post. Where layout default is just set up for text input, and layout post has been set up to stylize the page (not quite sure how this all works yet, but it did what I wanted it to do so that's good enough for now). So i changed that and it started to look more like something that would work.
The only thing was that I was unable to add my own text and pictures to the page, and it was purely just a list of blog entries. But nearly there. So i did a bit of research into pages and what I needed to do to allow me to input my own content and realised that i needed to add a content section to my layout itself, or I could write as much as I wanted but it would not show up.
Now I have a "latest 2" blog entries on my front page, and a seperate page for my blog posts depending on the category. It has taken my all morning, a good 4 hours to do these simple tasks. But I guess Rome wasn't built in a day.
There is so much more I want to learn, modify and create. But for today I think that's enough. Time to actually get dressed, eat something and maybe do some decorating (probably not, but I like to tell myself I will in hope that one day I will actually listen).
Only 29 official changes, but what felt like 129 with the amount of trial end error.
