MRGS/SLMR Blog

Hi! Here's the source for the new MRGS/SLMR blog, located at mrgs.ca and hosted here as a Jekyll-based Github Page.

IF YOU WANT TO WRITE A POST OR ADD A PAGE:

• Sign up for a Github account if you don't have one! Then get write access to this repo: poke someone with ownership of the MRGS Github organization and they'll add you.

• Head over to prose.io and authorize it to access your Github credentials.

• To create a post, enter the "mrgs.github.io" repository in Prose, then head to the _posts or _drafts directory and hit "New File" to start drafting one up. Simple as that.

• If you want to add a new static page instead (like "mrgs.ca/parcade",) just hit "New File" from the site root in Prose, and change the filename to something like "parcade/index.md" -- that is, the directory name should match the path to the page.

  (Note that there'll be a way to change the layout to a static page-specific one when we get there. Sooooon.)

That should be all you need to start making pages and posts! The Prose interface can be a little confusing at first, but it should provide all the tools you need to preview your as they'll appear on the live site.

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IF YOU WANT TO EDIT THE SITE'S LAYOUT OR CSS

Hacking on the site's look is a bit more complicated. We want to be able to tweak things and see how they look locally, without having to push those changes up to the live site. That means installing a local toolchain, unfortunately.

You only need to do this stuff if you're editing layouts!

On OSX:

• Clone the repo locally, if you haven't already.
• The easiest way to get all the dependencies is to install Brew if you don't have it. Follow the instructions on the site and you'll be up and running in no time.
• Open the Terminal and run brew install node.
• Run npm install -g bower gulp. (These'll install the Node-based tools Bower and Gulp.)
• Run gem install jekyll bundler. (You might need to run these as sudo, as in sudo gem install jekyll bundler.)

On Windows:

• You'll need to install node.js manually. It should add itself to your PATH so that you can execute it from the command line.
• You'll also need Ruby -- probably the easiest way to install it is to use the aptly-named RubyInstaller.
• From a command prompt, run npm install -g bower gulp to grab Bower and Gulp.
• Run gem install jekyll bundler to grab the Ruby-based dependencies.

On Linux:

• You can grab node.js and Ruby via your favourite package manager. Remember that the packages in your distro's repositories might lag behind the latest versions by a significant factor, so if you're getting weird errors you might want to seek out PPAs/repos that offer binaries from closer upstream.
• sudo npm install -g bower gulp and sudo gem install jekyll bundler to install all the dependencies.

All platforms:

• cd into the local directory to which you cloned the repo and run npm install, bower install and bundle install.

Now from the command line in the project directory you can run the build task: gulp serve will launch your browser and crank up a compact local server that watches for changes on the site and automatically rebuild and refresh the view as you make changes. Hooray! Edit the files in the _less, _src, _layouts, and _includes directories to your heart's content.