Previously this blog was authored with Apple’s iWeb. When Apple discontinued their MobileMe hosting service I moved the blog to a different web host but found it unwieldy to update on a regular basis.
Recently we decided to start a blog to document some of the baking projects we enjoy. This was a great opportunity to explore current blog authoring tools and we found Jekyll to be a really nice way to generate a static web site. Being able to use the Markdown format allows for blog entries to be written in a plain text editor and changes to be easily tracked in a git repository.
After getting the baking blog online I turned my attention to rebuilding this blog. One of the big concerns when making significant changes to a blog is that older entries and pages should remain at the same URL so as to accomodate links from various parts of the web. This is easily accomplished in Jekyll by means of the optional permalink parameter for each page. A helpful tool to find critical links was the Links to Your Site feature of the Google Search Console. With this I was able to verify that known links would continue to work.
The icons for the files on the Files page are automatically generated through the Mac OS X AppKit framework. A Jeykll plugin I created named JekyllAttachmentTag handles this as well as generating HTML for each referenced file.
The gallery thumbnails and zooming on the Apple Store, 5th Avenue page are handled by the JekyllGalleryTag plugin as well as the fancyBox tool.