isabella232 / jekyll-softwaremill

SoftwareMill.com website written in Jekyll

THIS IS AN OLD SITE. IT IS NO LONGER USED. NEW SITE IS AT https://github.com/softwaremill/website

softwaremill.com v2.5 based on Jekyll

Quick howtos

Running in development

Vagrant virtual machine

As a sort of express lane, you can run a Vagrant virtual machine with the proper ruby version and all the necessary gems installed. To initialize it:

1. Enter the vagrant subdirectory.
2. Run the vagrant up command. The first execution is going to take a while, as Vagrant needs to download and install all the packages, rvm, ruby, gems, etc.
3. Enter the virtual machine with vagrant ssh.

After that, you'll find a jekyll-softwaremill in the home directory, which is the same jekyll-softwaremill as the one on your host. So all the changes made on your host in IDEA (or any other editor), are visible also on the virtual machine.

To start working within the virtual machine, on the site itself:

1. vagrant ssh and cd jekyll-softwaremill if not there already (ignore the RVM warning).
2. Regenerate blogs.
3. Serve the page from Jekyll.

Port 4000 is mapped, so when you serve the page on virtual machine, you can open a browser on your host and see the page on localhost:4000.

Run jekyll on your host (outside of Vagrant)

Pre-step 1 - Install Ruby 2.1.2 (where applicable)

if (ruby -v !=2.1.2) continue

1. curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
2. source ~/.profile
3. rvm install ruby-2.1.2
4. In case of certificate verify failed navigate to rubygems and get tgz and install rubygems by ruby setup.rb

Pre-step 2 - Install and apply bundler

1. Ensure Ruby version is as defined in Gemfile.
2. gem install bundler
3. bundle
4. You may need to add $HOME/.gem/ruby/1.9.1/bin to $PATH.

Pre-step 3 - Install blog generator dependencies

1. Install PHP for command line. Package name is usually php-cli.
2. Go to __generators/ and call bundle.

Most likely you may need imagemagick in __generators/ for handling images.

1. brew install ImageMagick
2. gem install rmagick -v '2.13.3'

Running jekyll

Regenerating Twitter entries and blogs

Call __generators/generate.sh.

Locally most likely you will get, don't freak out.

[Thu Apr  9 12:58:22 CEST 2015] twitter-blog FAILED
[Thu Apr  9 12:58:22 CEST 2015] twitter-home FAILED

To solve that locally just create the missing files

touch _includes/generated/twitter-blog.html
touch _includes/generated/twitter-home.html

Serve the page from jekyll

Files are regenerated on every change. Note, IntelliJ saves a file after window defocus, so it's usually 2 seconds before you see the change.

1. bundle exec jekyll serve -w
2. Go to http://localhost:4000/.

Sending e-mails via contact form - pre-steps

__dynamic/contact.json.php is using built-in mail() function in PHP. It sends the e-mails via /usr/bin/sendmail. Server should have some sendmail-alternative installed. These days, msmtp is recommended, and it's installed on critical.sml.cumulushost.eu.

User running the server should create ~/.msmtprc:

defaults
auth on
tls on
tls_trust_file /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.crt

account default
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
from EMAIL
user EMAIL
password PASSWORD
tls_trust_file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

During the development you probably want to temporarily change $to = '[e-mail]'; in __dynamic/contact.json.php.

Running in production

Call bundle exec jekyll build to generate the website in _site.

Call __proxy/server.sh to serve _sites/ at http://localhost:8000/.

Pre-steps

1. Install Python 2.7.x.
2. cp __generators/secrets-config.example.php __generators/secrets-config.php and provide some API keys.

Auto-rebuild in production

Crontab entry:

* * * * * /home/softwaremill/jekyll-softwaremill/__generators/cron.sh

Make sure gem directory is in $PATH. Content is regenerated every 20 minutes.

Technical documentation

How to add a static page?

What you see in the project structure is what you get in the browser. File /img/agile.png is visible under address http://localhost:4000/img/agile.png.

The only exception is index.html - it's visible under http://localhost:4000/. Therefore, to add a new page, say /struts, you need to create /struts/index.html file.

Each file should contain this on top:

---
layout: default
title: Nice page name - SoftwareMill
description: A short 140-words SEO-friendly description, goes to meta description.
keywords: single, word, meta, description, double words
---

How to add a blog post on company blog?

Create a new file in _posts/company/. The filename should be YYYY-MM-DD-permalink-to-the-post.markdown. This is what every new post needs to have on top:

---
layout: simple_post
title: Your blog post title
description: A short description that will appear as a post excerpt. This will appear in Google as well. Keep it short.
keywords: list, of, several, most, important, words
author: Name Surname
categories:
- company
---

If you don't have an official photo yet, please remove a line with author_login. A placeholder will be rendered instead.

If you remove a post from company category, the post will be available via a permalink only. It won't appear on the blog. May be useful for testing.

If you'd like to add a Table of Contents to the left, add the include_toc: true option.

Below the --- you write a post in Markdown flavor. It's the same as on Github. See an example blog post and Markdown documentation for details.

You may use a plain HTML. Change the file extension to html. You may also use Textile or whatever but you have to figure out yourself.

How to add presentation post?

Create a new file in _posts/presentations/. The filename should be YYYY-MM-DD-permalink-to-the-post.markdown. This is what every new post needs to have on top:

---
layout: simple_presentation
title: Your conference talk topic
abstract_fragment: Short abstract fragment to be displayed on post thumbnail
keywords: list, of, several, most, important, words
speaker: Name Surname
speaker_login: login
categories:
- presentations
---

• login should be equal to the filaname of photo of person
• if there's no photo yet, clone img/members/no-image.png no-image.png into new file person_login.png and use it as a speaker-Login

If you remove a post from presentation category, the post will be available via a permalink only. It won't appear on the blog. May be useful for testing.

Below the --- you write a post in Markdown flavor. It's the same as on Github. See an example presentation post and Markdown documentation for details.

You may use a plain HTML. Change the file extension to html. You may also use Textile or whatever but you have to figure out yourself.

Embedding slides

Slides should be embedded using size 427x356, check example presentation post for details

IMPORTANT: For embed code created by Slideshare you have to replace http with https in code snippet. Standard http won't work on softwaremill.com

For Slideshare you can also remove last text section below slides, something like "from " as in most cases only presentation title is enough.

Embedding video

Video from Youtube should be embedded with 429x241, again check example presentation post to see how it should be done.

Q&A

• Why PHP?

• Twitter feeds collector, e-mail sender and newsletter is Balsam's code. Copy-paste ftw.

• Why Python?

• Python has an embedded HTTP server called SimpleHTTPServer. Adding a custom 404 page, url rewriting and threaded dispatching was a matter of a few lines of code. We don't need to mess with Apache to achieve such trivial things.

• Why Ruby?

• Jekyll is written in Ruby.

What can be done better?

1. Replace crappy __dynamic/contact.json.php with gem mail. This will eliminate a need for sendmail.
2. Replace crappy Twitter generators written in PHP with gem twitter. This will also eliminate a need for maintaining a config a PHP-based configuration file. Ruby hash would suffice.
3. Upgrade Jekyll to Octopress.