title	date	description	categories	layout	type
Smartdown Blog Kit	2020-03-13	Examples, tools and templates to publish Smartdown-enabled blogs		default	home

smartdown/blog-kit

Examples, tools and templates to publish Smartdown-enabled blogs

This README.md document is intended for authors who wish to deploy their static website or blog using the templates in this repository. This document will not be visible to visitors of the deployed blog.

An important goal of this project is to separate an author's original content from the boilerplate mechanics of presentation and deployment. This is still an imperfect separation, but for the most part, an author's content will reside in the _pages and _posts directories at the root of this project. The mechanics of publishing this content to a particular site with a particular theme has been abstracted into the idea of a target. A target is a subdirectory of the content repo that has theme-specific and site-specific configuration information.

QuickStart

This will enable you to quickly set up a copy of the blog-kit example on a forked version of the GitHub repo.

Fork or Copy the Repository

• Fork the blog-kit GitHub repository using Fork.
• If desired, rename your forked repository and edit its description from the default to a description of your choice. The name of the forked repository will be used as the default website name when deployed. For the purpose of this QuickStart, we'll assume you've left the name as blog-kit.

Choose a target

• The blog-kit supports the idea of deploying a set of shared content to a variety of possible targets. For this QuickStart, you will need to choose a target deployment from the current list:
  • cb: Based on Start Bootstrap's Clean Blog - Jekyll blog theme.
  • sp: Based on Start Bootstrap's Stylish Portfolio
  • mm: Based on Minimal Mistakes blog theme.
  • alembic: Based on Alembic blog theme.
  • sparrow: Based on Sparrow blog theme.
• Let's assume you choose the 'mm' target for the remainder of this QuickStart.

Install dependencies

Many of the targets assume a Jekyll-based deployment and rely on various Ruby Gems to enable local development and static site building. So you will need to perform a one-time installation of the necessary dependencies.

• Verify you have Ruby installed. there is probably documentation about this on the Jekyll site.
• Go to the mm targets directory: cd targets/mm/
• Install dependencies: bundle install

Serve the site locally

Assuming your current directory is your local root (blog-kit/, for this QuickStart), then you can serve the mm site locally with the command targets/serve.sh mm.

Publish the site to your repo's GitHub Pages

Assuming your current directory is your local root (blog-kit/, for this QuickStart), then you can publish the mm site locally with the command targets/publish.sh mm.

Adding Content: Pages vs Posts

Customizing the Look and Style of your new site

Basics of Markdown

Basics of Smartdown

Details, Details, Details

targets/ scripts

The targets/ subdirectory of this project contains several scripts to manage the different targets.

• targets/serve.sh <target-name>
• targets/publish.sh <target-name>
• targets/clean.sh <target-name>
• targets/build.sh <target-name>
• targets/sync.sh <target-name>

Typically, only serve.sh and publish.sh will be used.

Default GitHub Pages Domain Name Setup

Talk about the default, where the user doesn't use CNAME

Custom GitHub Pages Domain Name Setup

Talk about using CNAME and how this will inhibit https unless you augment it with a service like CloudFlare

Setting up CloudFlare to enable https

blah blah blah

License and Credits

Mostly links to the software used

Version History

0.0.1 - Initial version of smartdown.io blog, based on blog-kit v0.0.4.