Dr Daft's Playgrounds

This is a sandbox-style GitHub repo intended for an assortment of curious (mostly speculative) design and coding work, including but not limited to:

• Practicing programming skills
• Showcasing playful and quirky ideas
• Learning through experimentation
• Documenting small prototypes

How to navigate this repo

This repository uses custom and minimal Jekyll to display projects over a single homepage. Each project is independent and works out of individual folders so if you would like to unpack them feel free to!

Here's a break down of how the Jekyll side of things is managed but a more detailed explanation is on my blog post.

_data/projects/  # project metadata as .yml files
projects/        # where all projects reside

Using metadata

To add new projects simply import them into the projects/ folder and add the respective metadata in _data/projects/[project-folder].yml. The YAML file should have the same name as the project folder.

For projects that are not in the projects/ folder use external: true in YAML with a direct link in the url field

Injecting Navigation

Since all projects are independent of the main Jekyll site, adding links back to the root index requires manually inserting a return link. This is tedious and unintutive because any change requires updating all links individually. As a work around the inject-return-links.js and remove-return-links.js scripts can be used to add/remove the return to root back-link at the bottom of each index.html.

Using the script is simple and can be done from the terminal.

node inject-return-links.js
node remove-return-links.js

When any changes are needed such as styling or adding/removing content from the links, the inject-return-links.js script can be updated.

Local Testing

This repo is designed to use Github Pages to deliver content through Github provided Jekyll and a custom setup. To test locally Ruby and Jekyll need to be installed on a local machine where this git repo has been cloned. After installing Ruby + Jekyll the following commands can be run in terminal to test locally from the root of the repo. The Gemfile must be in the root folder for these commands to work.

# Ensure all required gems are installed first
bundle install
# Start a local testing copy of site
# The baseurl is setup this way to ensure links are all working
# as they would in Github Pages with the repo name
bundle exec jekyll serve --baseurl="/playgrounds"
# use bottom if using DNS