I cobbled together a hacker-friendly environment for this blog as a Visual Studio project; posts are created, edited, previewed and pushed from with Visual Studio.
The GitHub repository for this site is a template for a personal GitHub Pages site, but you can fork it and use it as a starting point if this environment sounds appealing to you.
Recommended Components
- Visual Studio 2010+ as an IDE
- VsVim for vi-mode awesomeness
- Markdown Mode Extension for WYSIWYG markdown preview
- Jekyll to generate the site and serve it locally
- Bundler to keep your Ruby gems in sync with GitHub
- Visual Studio Tools for Git or Git Source Control Provider to push updates to GitHub
- GitDiffMargin for keeping track of changes
- Visual Studio Web Browser or your default browser to preview the generated site
Usage
- Open the
site.slnin Visual Studio - Select the
_postsfolder of thesiteproject in the Solution Explorer. - Create a new post using
Ctrl+Shift+A, select Text File, and name itNNNN-NN-NN-title.md - Use the Show preview window button to show the Markdown Preview tool window (dock it with Solution Explorer)
- Write your post in Markdown!
- Press
Ctrl+F5to start Jekyll (via bundle) serving your site Ctrl+Clickthis link to open your local site a Visual Studio editor window or- open the
site.htmlfile in the editor and pressCtrl+Shift+Wto open the local site in your default browser - Continue with “edit, preview” cycle until you are happy with the results
- Go to Team Explorer -> Changes or Pending Changelist and commit your changes
- Go to Team Explorer -> Unsynced Commits or Git Bash and push to GitHub