designsuperbuild

Next-Gen Static Sites

When it came to building a new site for designsuperbuild using WordPress or Rails seemed a bit overkill - I didn't really want to have to deal with a web interface to just write a few posts. In fact, when I thought about it, I could make the site static and use javascript to pull in any dynamic content. This would give me a site that could easily deal with high traffic and take very little maintenance. Having said that I didn't want to get rid of the goodness that Sass, CoffeeScript and Backbone.js add to my development workflow.

I'd heard good things about Jekyll - Github use it for Github Pages - so I thought I'd give it a try. It's theoretically very simple - you set up a directory hierarchy and then run a command line utility that walks your directories, processing templates and markup files through any needed filters and then rendering your pages out to a _site folder that you can then upload to any server.

With a few plugins you can get a modern development stack up pretty quickly:

Jekyll

The generator itself itself, comes as a Ruby Gem so you'll need to have Ruby installed on your machine

Jekyll Bootstrap

Lots of documentation on developing Jekyll sites and customising the tool

Jekyll Plug-ins

just save these Gists into your _plugins directory and make sure you've installed any Ruby Gems that are needed:

• Coffeescript
• SASS

Drop a few javascript libraries in your js folder and your good to go. Next post I'll cover using Ruby and Backbone.js to add dynamic elements to a static site.

A Sneak Peak of Our First iPhone Game

We're nearing the end of development on our first iPhone game, an adaptation of the earliest known board game , The Royal Game of Url (wikipedia). Here's a couple of screen shots of the latest version:

Hopefully a February launch is on the cards but, as always, it's in the hands of the AppStore gods - we wait with baited breath.

Upgrading Orange Nexus S to Android Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS)

Upgrading Android ROMs seems really hard if you just read through blogpost you find searching the web. If you've got a Nexus S from Orange it's actually pretty easy, but you need to find the right upgrade file.

First you need to go into Settings -> About and find your build number, for a stock Orange Nexus S it was GRH78 but yours might vary. Then you need to go to this very useful page of Android ROMs ( ROM List ) and find the right incremental update. For me I wanted to go from Android 2.3.1 (Build GRH78) to the latest Android 4.0.3 release. Download that zip and follow the standard upgrade instructions but use that zip file, there's a simple guide on ZDNet here

Some Resources For Learning Ruby

I'm a big fan of Ruby as a programming language and was asked for some resources for learning Ruby the other day, here's some good places to start:

The Well Grounded Rubyist - best learning ruby book, and one of the better programming books i've read, well worth the money if you want a solid understanding
http://www.manning.com/black2/

Learn Ruby The Hard Way - from absolute beginner to programming a web game,
http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/book/

Rails for Zombies - codeschool.com free course, learn Rails in the browser http://railsforzombies.org/

and, if you want a more unique guide, try the legendary _why's Poignant guide to Ruby, with lots of pictures of fox http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/