Part 8 - Conclusion and Future Learning

This post concludes the tutorial and attempts to summarise the achievements produced through the tutorial. Furthermore, this post presents ideas for future learning.

This tutorial has provided a guide for creating a simple blog using the Jekyll SSG, including:

• Understanding the difference between CMS and SSG,
• Setup of Jekyll and associated technologies (e.g., Ruby, gem, bundler, Git, etc.)
• Creation of a basic-blog website to practice building, locally serving, and understanding a Jekyll website structure
• Preparing an existing Jekyll theme to create the poole-master website for feature augmentation
• Using Git and GitHub to track project changes and facilitate the use of free hosting on GitHub Pages for automatic Jekyll building
• Creating content-focused blog posts with consistent design via Markdown text-files
• Leveraging Jekyll website structure knowledge to investigate and add a page navigation-bar to the poole-master website using several web-technologies (e.g., HTML, Markdown, Liquid, YAML, etc.)
• Enhancing post navigation via adding an Archive page to the poole-master website through the use of aforementioned web-technologies
• Integrating current (e.g., JavaScript) and developing web-technologies (HTML5 LocalStorage API) to create a data-persisting simple form enabling improvement of user-experience
• Etc.

Despite the many concepts and technologies Jekyll includes, only a select few were focused on in this tutorial to enable a webmaster to obtain the required skills to create and understand a statically generated Jekyll blog website.

Ergo, there remain many opportunities for improvement and future learning including but not limited to:

• Adding backwards and forward post-navigation to posts viewed from the Archive page (i.e., when a post is selected from the Archive page, the Jekyll paging-plugin is not displayed, furthermore it appears to provide back/forward navigation based on the posts viewed from index.html)
• Data persistence in the form could be expanded to include several inputs
• Adding a list of recent posts using a limit filter via Liquid, and displaying post excerpts (toggleable via _config.yml)
• Experimenting with changing styling across the poole-website via SASS
• Adding a dynamic commenting system via Disqus as demonstrated by (Lande 2014)¹
• Addition of Google Analytics may be useful for webmasters requiring tools for analysis of visitor usage as demonstrated by (Lande 2014)¹
• Etc.

The aforementioned opportunities for learning were contemplated during the development of this tutorial and have sparked keen interest in several aspects pertaining current and developing web-technologies, e.g.,

• Investigating other HTML5 APIs such as the Media and Canvas APIs
• Experimenting with other Jekyll website concepts such as using SASS for reusable styling
• Learning more about and comparing YAML to other web data formats (e.g., JSON, XML)
• Server-side JavaScript applications via node.js
• Front-end designs via the React framework
• Etc.

A reflective report pertaining development of this tutorial blog website is viewable via the Reflection page or downloadable here.

References