The focus of the second session of the Github Pages Portfolio Course is the installation of a ruby based tool chain, and the implementation of Jekyll for a portfolio website including blog posts and portfolio projects. This is a meaty class that is entirely hands on. By the end of the session, students have a great understanding of the ends and outs of Jekyll and have a fully functional github portfolio - just without projects that should be hosted in github. And we add those in session #3!

Topics in this class include:

  1. Retrospectives on Session #1 - What’s good and what’s needs improvement.

  2. Jekyll - the big picture - How Jekyll will help us manage our portfolio, blog and website.

  3. Introduction to tool chains with ruby - What is a tool chain and what components are in pretty much all tool chains.

  4. rvm - the ruby version manager - A quick intro and installation of the most commonly used ruby version manager rvm

  5. Validating rvm and ruby installation - Did the installation work?

  6. ruby gems & rvm gemsets - How we manage the code we download using ruby gems.

  7. Jekyll Installation and Website Creations - How to using Jekyll to create a brand new static website.

  8. _config.yml personalization - Let’s customize our new website and make it ours.

  9. Creating a blog post with rake - What is rake and how do we use it?

  10. The basics of Markdown - Is markdown easier than html? If so, why?

  11. Markdown Front Matter - We setup the meta-data about our new posts and see the results.

  12. Your First Project Post - We create a new category of posts - a project!

  13. Creating a Portfolio Project List Page - Now let’s create a list of projects in our portfolio!

The First Part of Github Pages Portfolio Development - Session 1

The Third Part of Github Pages Portfolio Development - Session 3