Endowl 🦉 - Virtual Estate Planning

Learn about Endowl and sign-up for project updates at endowl.com

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Endowl.com website maintenance using Jekyll and Github Pages

ONE TIME SETUP:

WINDOWS: Install Jekyll on local development machine:

• Download and install the latest “Ruby+Devkit” from https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/

• During installation there will be a prompt to install “MSYS2”; when given 3 choices, enter “1” for “MSYS2 base installation”.

• In a new Command Prompt, install Jekyll and the Ruby package manager by running:

    gem install jekyll bundler
  

LINUX & MAC OS: Install Jekyll on local development machine:

• See: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/installation/

Clone ‘endowl’ Jekyll repository:

• In a Command Prompt or terminal, change to the desired project parent directory.

• Clone project from github:

    clone https://github.com/endowl/endowl.git
  

• Install dependencies

    cd endowl
    bundler install
  

USAGE:

Local development server:

• Start local Jekyll development server from the project directory, with post drafts visible:

    bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts
  

• Stop a running Jekyll development server:

    [ctrl]-c
  

• Access development server at http://127.0.0.1:4000/

Blog posts:

• Store blog posts as .html or .md files in:

    blog/_posts/
  

• Name blog post files in this format: YEAR-MONTH-DAY-title.EXTENSION

  For example:

    blog/_posts/2020-11-13-this-day-in-history.html
  

• Blog posts should start with a “Front Matter” block like this example:

    ---
    layout: post
    title: Introducing Endowl 🦉
    subtitle: Create Your Family Fortune
    ---
  

Stand-alone Pages:

• Store anywhere except special folders that start with an underscore.

  Eg. do NOT store in the subdirectories:

    blog/_posts/ , _posts/ , _site/ , _layouts/ ...
  

• Okay to store in project root directory and subdirectories

  Eg. okay to store directly in:

    ./ , blog/ , assets/images/ , ...
  

• Okay to create arbitrary subdirectories and store files in them, eg:

    estate-planning/resources.html
  

• When processed by Jekyll, markdown files will be converted to HTML and their extensions will change from .md to .html on the generated site

• To be processed by Jekyll, pages must start with a “Front Matter” block like this:

    ---
    layout: page
    title: Estate Planning Glossary
    ---
  

• To generated the page at a different path, include a permalink variable in the Front Matter block, like:

    ---
    layout: page
    title: Estate Planning Glossary
    permalink: /glossary
    ---
  

Including and Linking to local assets and pages:

• Pages can be accessed with URLs that include or omit the trailing “.html”, eg. both of these are okay: /estate-planning-glossary and /estate-planning-glossary.html

• In markdown, include an image on the page like this:

    ![My helpful screenshot](/assets/screenshot.jpg)
  

• In markdown, link to a local file or page like this:

    ... you can [get the PDF](/assets/mydoc.pdf) directly.
  

• In HTML specify file paths with this syntax to generate links relative to the site root:

    {{ "/assets/images/Endowlhoriz.png" | relative_url }}
  

• In HTML a local image tag should look like:

    <img src="{{ "/assets/images/Endowlhoriz.png" | relative_url }}">
  

• In HTML a link to a local file should look like:

    <a href="{{ "/estate-planning-glossary" | relative_url }}">
  

Github:

• It can be more convenient to use git through a visual IDE, but the most common tasks can be done with these commands:

• To download and merge any changes to the project, run:

    git pull
  

• To save all local changes and push them up to github, run:

    git add -all
    git commit -m "message describing changes"
    git push
  

Stylesheets:

• The main (SASS) stylesheet for the site is generated from assets/css/main.scss

• The resulting (CSS) stylesheet is published to assets/css/main.css

Misc Notes:

• When “jekyll serve” is running locally, most file changes will be processed automatically. Changes to _config.yml are not automatically loaded and require restarting Jekyll.

• Use caution if editing _config.yml as .yml files are notoriously easy to mess up with incorrect whitespacing.

Reference:

Jekyll pages documentation

Jekyll posts documentation

How to Create a Blog Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages on Windows

Markdown Cheat Sheet