The Simplificator blog

Production URL: https://blog.simplificator.com

Provisioning and deployment

The blog is hosted on ZEIT, which automatically deploys on every push. ZEIT also renews TLS certificates on its own.

The latest commit on the master branch is deployed to production (blog.simplificator.com).

Commits to other branches are also deployed, but each deployment has its own URL. Look at the environments and status checks assigned to your pull requests.

Development setup

npm install
npm run serve

The blog is powered by Eleventy.

Please open pull requests for new blogs or features.

Guidelines for a new blog post

File name

The articles are Markdown files stored in content/posts/.

The name of the file is used in the article permalink:

• use dashes instead of spaces
• use lower case US ASCII characters (a-z) and numbers (0-9)

Example file name: encoding-hell-part-2.md.

Article metadata

Even though the articles are in the Markdown format, they should contain a YAML front matter. That is a collection of keys and values describing metadata about the article.

For example:

---
title: "User story mapping: a retrospective"
date: 2017-03-30
language: en
author: Jane Appleseed
tags:
  - user-story-mapping
  - projects
---

The front matter should have these fields:

• title: the blog post title, preferably surrounded by quotes.
• date: the publication date in YYYY-MM-DD format. This is used in the permalink.
• language: en or de. This is used to tell the browser and search engines which language is used, so that they don't need to guess.
• author: your name :)

Optional fields:

• tags: a list of tags for the blog post

Images

Images are stored in content/images/.

Use the image shortcode (defined in .eleventy.js) to insert an image in a post. For example:

{% image "./content/images/sitincator-wireframes.png", "Early Sitincator wireframes" %}

The first argument is the relative path to the image file from the project root. The second argument is the alternative text that describes the image.

You could additionally include a caption that is displayed below the image:

<figure>
  {% image "./content/images/first_website.png", "Screenshot of the first Simplificator website" %}
  <figcaption>Our website in 2007</figcaption>
</figure>