The last several posts have all referenced my struggles to get i-am.ski up and running in a manner that I was striving for; namely, to be able to update this site using just my iPad Pro in the simplest manner possible. If I had built i-am.ski with Wordpress or CraftCMS, or one of a half-dozen other available CMS frameworks, it would have been a simple matter of loading up a web browser and pointing it to the admin backend and posting from there.
But I went and got all pigheaded about this.
I like trying new things, and as I’ve stated before, wanted to simplify the site as much as possible. Just my words, and not much else. With this in mind, I chose Jekyll. Jekyll doesn’t have a handy admin backend from which I can submit my entries. Each page, whether it’s a post such as this one, or a page like my About page, is written in Markdown. Which is fairly straight forward once you get the hang of it. What I didn’t want was a bloated and confusing admin area that I had to navigate to create just a simple blog post. Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of CMSs have their place; Two of my other sites both use CraftCMS, and I’ve built a couple of other sites on Wordpress. They’re great tools when you have a beefy website to build.
Jekyll is a static site generator, meaning there’s no database that I need to configure. Just flat files, utilizing the Liquid templating language. And after weeks of trial and error, I finally have a workflow I’m comfortable with, with tools I enjoy using (that’s always a big plus), all from my iPad Pro, which is a great piece of technology. Here’s the breakdown:
Hosting: GitHub Pages. Quite frankly, this was the most difficult part of getting i-am.ski up and running. I have a hosting service that I’ve been using for more than 10 years now. But after a lot of research and trial and error (mostly error), I decided to move the i-am.ski domain off of my hosting, and put it on GitHub Pages. The beauty of this is that Jekyll has built-in support for GitHub Pages. When I make changes to the layout, or I submit a new post, GitHub Pages runs the required updates to spit out my changes. Simple to use and, amazingly, free as well.
Version Control: Working Copy. Working Copy is a git client for iOS that does everything you would expect a desktop git client to do. There was a bit of a learning curve, but, like most things, once I started using it often to update the site, it became a lot easier to check-in files to GitHub Pages’s repositories.
Editor: Textastic. I’m forever tweaking the site, and while I (think I) can update the files from Working Copy, Textastic is just a neat little text editor. Again, it’s for iOS, and supports syntax highlighting, SSH and FTP connections, and sports a host of other features.
Writing: iA Writer. Here’s the thing: I like apps and programs that are well designed, and get out of my way. I could, with minimal fuss, update not just the layout and code of i-am.ski with Textastic, but the blog posts as well. Textastic is fully capable of working with Markdown and would have been a viable solution when it came time to deciding what I wanted to use to actually write my posts. Cheaper, too.
I am, however, a sucker for a well-designed app. And I liked the look of iA writer. At $29.99, it’s certainly one of the more expensive apps I’ve purchased. I went back and forth for a couple of weeks before finally pulling the trigger and purchasing it. Quite risky for me, given there’s not even a free trial for iOS. But I’ve not had a single moment of buyer’s remorse since.
So there you have it; GitHub Pages hosts my site. I use Working Copy to checkout and check in the files I want to work on. Textastic for when I want to make changes to the layout or style sheet. And iA Writer for writing the content.
That’s the current state of i-am.ski. Next post, I hope to talk about the current state of SKI, as in, me, myself, and I. Stay tuned.