ricksladkey/ricksladkey.github.io

GitHub Pages Site Using Visual Studio

This site is set up as a Visual Studio solution; posts are created, edited, previewed and pushed from with Visual Studio.

This is my personal GitHub Pages site, but you can fork it and use it as a starting point if this environment sounds appealing to you.

Visual Studio 2010+ as an IDE
VsVim for vi-mode awesomeness
Markdown Mode Extension for WYSIWYG markdown preview
Fix File Encoding to keep Visual Studio from adding pesky BOMs to markdown text files
Jekyll to generate the site and serve it locally
Bundler to keep your Ruby gems in sync with GitHub
Visual Studio Tools for Git or Git Source Control Provider to push updates to GitHub
GitDiffMargin for keeping track of changes
Visual Studio Web Browser or your default browser to preview the generated site

Open the site.sln in Visual Studio
Select the _posts folder of the site project in the Solution Explorer.
Create a new post using Ctrl+Shift+A, select Text File, and name it NNNN-NN-NN-title.md (careful of byte order marks!)
Use the Show preview window button to show the Markdown Preview tool window (dock it with Solution Explorer)
Write your post in Markdown!
Press Ctrl+F5 to start Jekyll (via bundle) serving your site
Ctrl+Click this link to open your local site a Visual Studio editor window or
open the site.html file in the editor and press Ctrl+Shift+W to open the local site in your default browser
Continue with "edit, preview" cycle until you are happy with the results
Go to Team Explorer -> Changes or Pending Changelist and commit your changes
Go to Team Explorer -> Unsynced Commits or Git Bash and push to GitHub