Sculpin on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Sculpin to Jekyll

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I found Sculpin through @opdavies it looked really great, a PHP based blogging engine. It’s pretty decent but there are a few issues with it. Namely this, there’s already a PR for it but it’s not been merged in and doesn’t look like it will any time soon. The bug renders it all pretty useless when trying to modify things.

I was initially learning sculpin so that I could move Mental Health Awareness week over to it, but after trying to implement the existing theme in sculpin I found it nearly impossible to get anywhere fast. Theme support in Sculpin is a bit weird.

This is where Jekyll comes in, at Wunder our on-boarding and generally awesome docs are built using gh-pages which is a wrapper for Jekyll. It makes perfect sense to move to Jekyll and get to grips with it.

Migrating was relatively easy just nuking the slug part from each post was enough to get it parsing my old content. A quick sed did the trick. The theme went across relatively easily I just had to tweak a few values here and there. You can see the entire process in the git history on github.

I’ve had to rebuild my build job but that’s pretty easy using rvm on the build server.

Pretty pleased with the results so far. Next job is to clean the sass up and then completely rewrite the html and remove any cruft that’s come over in the 2 older migrations.

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Fun with Sculpin

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

After migrating my blog over to Sculpin I’ve slowly been tweaking things here and there. Over the past few days I’ve added the following:

Static social media links to post titles
Posted time ago on homepage
Comment counts after read more link
Gulp all the things

It’s been quite a lot of fun adding all these features. They all touch a wide range of services and different parts of the site.

Static social media links
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These are built with free icons converted into a font and then displayed in a span tag wrapped in a link to the various different social media sites.

Time ago
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This uses a jquery plugin called Timeago which tags onto html outputted by twig, I’m slowly getting to grips with twig through examples I find around the web. For some reason I just don’t get along with Symfony documentation.

Comment counts
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This is just javascript taken from Disqus, pain in the ass the get it setup though. Disqus as a whole isn’t great.

Gulp
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There is an outstanding pull request with Sculpin which without it makes using sculpin generate --watch --server painful, serving a page takes over a minute. So I’ve basically recreated a lot of the toolchain with gulp. I’ve pushed all the code up to the main repo and my gulpfile.js can be found here. Running gulp build kicks off a series of watch tasks that check the file system for any changes and then reacts based on whats changed. I then serve all the html content through drupalVM which I have permanently running in the background. One of the things I’ll love to see from sculpin generate is the ability to output the compiled site to a different directory outside of the main sculpin repo.

I’ve really enjoyed playing around with all this stuff and it feels good to be learning new things again and coding for pleasure.

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New Blog-ish

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve finally moved my blog from Ghost to Sculpin as you can probably see.

It’s all flat file html now which is generated via jenkins. I’m glad to be working with Jenkins again since I never really got on with Bamboo. I have quite a nice setup now. When I push a markdown post to the main repo it then triggers a build in jenkins which generates the css and html before copying it all to the webroot.

The theme is a modified version of Uno which I used on my Ghost blog. I’ve stripped out a load of stuff to make it simpler and styled it a bit, it’s not perfect but it’ll do. As part of porting the theme I’ve started using twig which has it’s pros and cons. Currently the html is a bit borked if it displays certain posts, luckily most browsers handle it ok. I’ve posted this question to see if anyone can help. I’ve also started to use Gulp to manage building the theme. I still have a long way to go with it since I need to minify the css and fix the image compression since it doesn’t appear to be working.

The migration was done by ghosttosculpin which I wrote using Symfony Console. I had a lot of fun writing it and it’s my first composer package.

Huge thanks to Oliver Davies for helping me get started and providing a good base to work off.

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Sculpin on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Sculpin to Jekyll

Fun with Sculpin

Static social media links #

Time ago #

Comment counts #

Gulp #

New Blog-ish

Static social media links
#

Time ago
#

Comment counts
#

Gulp
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