Blog Enhancements
in Blog on Projects
I took a brief pause between the first and second courses in this Harvard series to take another look at a couple of things. One of the things I need to wrestle with quickly is how to handle projects on this blog.
At the moment, I’m using the HydeJack theme. I could upgrade to the Pro version to get some additional support for projects. But I’m not certain I want that.
I went off on a journey on the web to see how others are using Hydejack or Jekyll in general for projects. I found a ton of orphaned sites. Lots of people seem to be starting or barely starting blogs and then abandoning them. I may have said earlier, but I find this blog is actually primarily for ME. If others are reading this, that’s great. And this does serve as a bit of a showcase. But I know from experience the value of being able to look backwards at logs, journals, etc., of your own work.
Sadly, I’ve also found very little really effective use of these project sections, tabs, pages or whatnot. But I did find a few. So I have to ponder what I want.
I am also reminded I need to go back and fluff out tags and categories. They end up a bit “messy” in the site layout if I don’t.
I also reviewed the blogs created by the 2017 Fall Cohort of the Metis Bootcamp. These were very project-centric actually. Maybe I’m just chatty. But again, experience has taught me that it’s actually very valuable to be able to look backwards after several months and years to see exactly what I was doing.
In any case, there really does seem to be a fairly consistent pattern here of portraying projects:
- Use a front-page of sorts which either uses a picture and one-liner for each project as a link to a more robust page for that project.
- Each project is summarized as a single page which is essentially a summary of the overall project with a focus on the results.
- Some pages includes links to the previous and next projects.
- Some folk used the blog as their mechanism to portray their projects. But then the blog served almost no other purpose.
So… what do I want?
Looking back at some of the better examples I’ve found using Hydejack Pro… I found one that rather easily incorporated links between the (single) post and the project page. I could do almost the same thing using a dedicated category page. In the interest of time, I probably should just upgrade. I likely won’t take advantage of everything in Pro. I’ve found an “Intro” I like better. I only hesitate because I’d probably benefit more from building my own stuff in Jekyll. But I know full well that could eat up a lot of time.
I need to move quickly here. Before the Metis Bootcamp starts, I would like to have back-created a page and some posts related to a project I did last year.
Time passes…
OK. I’m now halfway through the second course and taking some time to work on the blog. For the purpose of working in the project functionality, I elevated the previous post on SwirlyPy to a project. I do hope to keep working on that till it works well enough to serve my needs and help others.
While chasing this I found some eye-candy I also want. But… I’ve reached a point where I have what I want with regards to the project pages connecting to and from the related blog posts. So, I’m pushing.