My Personal Website - lanihuang.com

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I want to learn web development, so I build myself a website. It is built with Jekyll and GitHub Pages.

Generating Jekyll site locally

Since GitHub Pages natively support Jekyll, it can build the site for me once I push to the site's publishing branch. However, GitHub Pages only support a limited number of Jekyll plugins. As a DIY person, I chose to work around this by generating the site locally and then push the static files to my GitHub Pages site. This way, I can use any Jekyll plugins as I want. Also, I get to test the site locally before publishing it.

For this to work, I have to maintain two branches in my GitHub repo, one for editing, and the other for GitHub Pages. This sounds like a pain, but luckily I found this and learned to create a Rakefile to run those tedious tasks for me.

I'm Lazy, so I learn Gulp

As I develop this site, I came across so many inconvenience that led me to learn to use a build system, Gulp. After some googling and watching some YouTube videos, I can streamline the build process by automatically adding vendor prefixes, reloading browser when files are changed and etc.

Tools

Gulp plugins used: