XerxesDGreat.github.io i-josh.com

This repository contains the source files for the i-josh.com website.

Info

The site uses the following little bits of technology

• Github-provided Jekyll static site generator functionality
• Chirpy theme with some personal modifications
• OpenSeadragon for large image viewing

How to run

Ruby environment

Note

I'm not a Ruby developer, so there's likely much better ways to do this; I'm just telling you what I did.

# chruby is a ruby environment manager; ruby-install makes it easy to install ruby (I guess?)
$ brew install chruby ruby-install

# actually install ruby; when I did this, it was v3.4.4
$ ruby-install ruby

# install some ruby gems we'll need to use
$ gem install bundler jekyll

Website

# make the data available locally
$ git clone [email protected]:XerxesDGreat/XerxesDGreat.github.io.git

# run the application
$ cd XerxesDGreat.github.io
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec jekyll serve

# after a few moments (up to a minute, I've found), the site should be available
# at http://localhost:4000

Adding content

Posts

Where they go

All posts go into the _posts directory with the naming convention YYYY-MM-DD-<postSlug>.md. I don't know what happens if there are two posts with the same postSlug, but perhaps try to avoid it. I'm sure it wouldn't be a major issue; Jekyll will probably just do like Windows and add (1) to the post name or something.

Frontmatter

Frontmatter should contain the following keys:

---

# these keys are required
title: <Title which is displayed in the website>
date: <Should match the date on the file>
category: <Technically I think it supports multiple categories, but stick to one>
tags: 
- <a list>
- <of case-sensitive tags>

# optional
layout: <for a different layout than post; accepts `panorama` for now>
description: <uh... description>
toc: false <if you don't want a table of contents on the right>
slug: <if you want to override the default slugification>
---

Images

Images go into a directory per post, based on the slug. For instance, if you have an image called mycar.jpg in the post 2025-06-09-i-got-a-new-car.md, you'd put the image in the directory assets/img/posts/i-got-a-new-car/mycar.jpg. However, this is a convention and doesn't provide any additional functionality as you still have to use ![description](/assets/img/<slugName>/<imageFileName>) to make the image appear.

A preview image for the post can be added to the frontmatter:

---
image:
  path: /path/to/image
  alt: image alt text
---

Note that the image is expected to be 1200 x 630; it will be scaled and cropped if it isn't

More Information

Check out the theme's docs.