Expose is great, I came across that too when it was shared here. The author has created some beautiful themes and the example sites look great.
I was keen to contribute to it (to try add other template engines, caching, etc.) however it is written in bash and the script is over 900 lines and doesn't have a test suite yet. Not being too proficient in bash I was a bit anxious about diving in and contributing.
Completely agree, it is a place holder until I've put together my own site which I'll ideally demo there. I've spent all my time tweaking and improving Photish that I haven't had time to start the site that I wanted to create before I made the tool!
A demo is available running "photish init --example && photish host", the design is kinda embarrassing though so I wouldn't want people misjudging the possibilities of what you can create with my poor example site design :)
Thanks for poking around, testing is important to me too. There are also feature tests with cucumber/aruba in the /features directory.
Thanks for the feedback, it is on my to do. However for now, Photish itself is probably best showcased by running it and checking it out. After it is installed, an example/demo is provided by running:
photish init --example && photish host
Once I put together a nice template and some example sites I they would better showcase my HTML/CSS/JavaSCript and design skills rather then what Photish can do. Theoretically any design could be created using Photish as the templates and assets are completely up to you. The tool just takes care of the generation.
I created Photish as most of the static website generators I came across and used were text focused. The tooling, patterns and structure were geared towards sites with lots of text based content.
Photish is focused on photo based websites. Using a collection of albums in a folder, some templates defined in the language of your choice and some (optional) accompanying metadata in a YAML file, Photish will transcode your images into your desired formats (using ImageMagick) and parse and render the templates against your photo collection.
Transcoding large photo collections can take time, Photish does it's best to speed up this process by creating multiple threads to allow ImageMagick transcodes to run in parallel. It also caches all transcodes to avoid regeneration as you develop your site locally.
Try it out, let me know what you think! The project is in it's early days but it is in a working and performant state. Happy to take feature requests and or pull requests.
- Set 2 or 3 learning topic goals - write these down
- Identify what the best resources are available to learn that topic, purchase them (making a financial commit to it helps drive me too), ensure you have a mix of reading, audio and video material
- Find out who the bloggers are in those topic areas and subscribe to their blogs, getting regular news articles and posts helps keeps me motivated
- Join a user group in your local area so you can meet other people to engage in discussion about the topic
- Lock in a few hours over the weekend or in the evenings to go to a cafe or to sit at your desk with a coffee and go over the material
- Write about the topic, talk to your friends and colleagues about the topic, do a presentation on the topic to a user group
This is the process I have been following for years since I left university and has helped me master new technologies and business management theories.
I work as a consultant so I am always getting exposed to new industries and technologies. Sometimes I am learning because I absolutely have to in order to be successful on the project I have signed up for, or otherwise I find my self learning new things because I have either heard of a topic through a friend/colleague or I have a general interest. I usually have 2 or 3 topics i.e. Ruby, Systems Thinking, Presenting, that I want to focus on.
For each of those focus topics I then:
- Read a lot! I try and get a book done each week, maybe a second on the weekend. I have worked hard at improving my reading speed and if I really focus when I read (sit down at a desk, remove any distractions, get a nice coffee) I find I can get through material very quickly. While I am reading I take notes, I use these notes later on for writing (see later point)
- Listen to podcasts/audiobooks, I like to put on an audio book and do a repetitive form of exercise or just walk around, I live in a city with lots of great places to walk so heading out for a 4 hour walk in the evening is easy and I can easily get through an audiobook, I take notes while I walk too.
- Write about it, if I am learning about something I like to write about it too, this helps me cement the topic I am learning.
- Do a course or workbook on the topic
Apart from the focus topic areas, I am subscribed to the Economist, Bloomberg Business week and various mailing lists, I like to scan through these articles and read any that catch my attention, I feel that having these taps on broader interest areas keeps me from getting too bored or narrow in my field of specialty (which is software).
I think the thing that helps me the most though is that I work as a consultant. I move industries (banking, retail, government, biochemical) and technology (c#, java, ruby, javascript) every few months so I am constantly finding myself in the deep end in new fields - this drives me to be on top things and is a good motivator to rapidly learn.
I have learned more in my 4 years as a consultant then I did in the 4 years at uni and 3 years working for other software shops.
I also use Jekyll, it has been the perfect tool for my blog.