Forking Jekyll: Now With LESS and Growl Notifications
Introducing tatey-jekyll, a fork which adds support for compiling LESS into CSS, optional Growl notifications with build statuses and a Liquid permalink tag for linking to published posts. It’s compatible for sites built with Jekyll 0.5.4.
Install
You’ll need to install the LESS gem and replace the .css extensions on your stylesheet with .less. LESS will compile your stylesheets without additional modification.
$ gem install tatey-jekyll -s http://gemcutter.org
If you’re a Mac OS X user with Growl installed, you’ll want to install growlnotify (Command line tool available in Growl Extras) and the Growl gem which provides Ruby bindings to growlnotify.
Motivations
Jekyll is my favourite piece of blogging software. More recently, I’ve been thinking about using Jekyll to build a couple of business to business orientated sites at work. We need to get them out quickly, and we’re not expecting them to change frequently. A full blown content management system is overkill, and a pure static site is a maintenance nightmare. Jekyll is the perfect match. This project in combination with my working experience of Jekyll has lead to me add a couple of features which will continue to make life easier for myself and my colleagues.
LESS
LESS is an extension to CSS which adds variables, nesting and mixins. Unlike Sass, LESS strives for familiarity and backwards compatibility with CSS. After migrating from LESS, my stylesheets are more organised and reusable. Take a look at the before and after for tatey.com.
Growl notifications
Stop killing your browser’s reload button and let Jekyll notify you when the build is complete.
Liquid permalink tag
Link to a published post by its name and the permalink tag will be compiled into an anchor. The permalink tag will respect your post’s permalink structure.
{% permalink ‘Earlier post’, ‘2009-09-09-foo’ %}
…is compiled to
<a href=“/2009/09/09/foo/”>Earlier post</a>
Note
If you’re looking for Haml and Sass compatibility, you ought to checkout Henrik Nyh’s fork.
Updated 2010-02-16
My fork has been renamed to Jekylless. Read about the motivations behind the change.