Jigsaw Clean Blog 📚

Rick West — Sun, 21 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so this isn't actually as exciting as it sounds. I basically just rebuilt my blog using Tightens Jigsaw static site generator and then packaged it up in to a starter template, making it available on Packagist for others to use!

Deciding I wanted to move my blog away from Wordpress and towards a more lightweight, developer oriented static site generator, Jigsaw was the obvious choice for so many reasons that I previously discussed here.

The only downside, moving to Jigsaw, was the initial 'development' of the blog itself. I say downside, but being an enthusiastic developer, I actually enjoyed the process. However, I can see how that initial hurdle and time commitment might put some people off making the switch. It's hard enough finding the time to actually write a blog post, never mind move the blog to a new platform and make it look pretty. We all lead busy lives after all!

Not only that, but it's safe to say that we don't all have an eye for design, I certainly don't! However, I had recently stumbled across Nuno Maduro's blog, and really liked the clean look of it, so I decided to port the Startbootstrap Clean Blog over to Jigsaw and use that myself, on this very website 😊.

The Package

When Tighten published a post about Jigsaw starter templates, this inspired me to package up my Jigsaw implementation of the Clean Blog theme and make it available to others. As a result the jigsaw-clean-blog starter was born! It's my first 'package', and I really enjoyed the process of putting it together. If it can help save one person from reinventing the wheel or lower the barrier of entry for someone wanting to try the awesome Jigsaw then it's a job well done 👌.

Get the starter! - https://github.com/rickwest/jigsaw-clean-blog

What's Included

This fully-responsive (based on Bootstrap 4) starter template includes some sample pages and comes pre configured with:

Syntax highlighting with highlight.js
A script that automatically generates a sitemap.xml
A script that automatically generates a RSS feed
A custom 404 page
A contact form with formSpree integration

Getting Started

You can get up and running with this starter in 3 quick easy steps:

Create the project directory

mkdir my-clean-blog

Install Jigsaw via Composer

cd my-clean-blog
composer require tightenco/jigsaw

Initialize your project

./vendor/bin/jigsaw init rickwest/jigsaw-clean-blog

Once that you have everything installed, you can then serve the site using PHP ./vendor/bin/jigsaw serve or alternatively, using Browsersync yarn run watch

Over To You

Although only a very simple project, just putting something out there has been a pretty big deal for me, but also a process that I've enjoyed wholeheartedly.

With that said, I'd love to get your feedback on this Jigsaw starter, especially if you've decided to give it a try.