Real World Content Strategy with Jekyll

for JekyllConf 2016

Transcript

1. Real World Content Strategy with
2. {static is} The New Dynamic www.thenewdynamic.org
3. • Links to articles, tutorials, presentations • Events • Original Articles • Showcase of Interesting Use-cases • Opinionated list of tools and resources • Job Board (soon!) {static is} The New Dynamic
4. –Tom Preston-Werner, 2008 “Blogging Like a Hacker”
5. Why wouldn’t anyone want their site to be… • Faster • More secure • Really efficient to build
6. Simplicity
7. Too Simple?
8. Why not, really? Content can get complex Non-technical content creators image: complexityandthebeast.com
9. –Eric Gunderson, Development Seed, 2013 “It's Called Jekyll, and It Works” “Good morning tech pundits! The main HealthCare.gov landing page and the thousands of subpages that educate the public on Affordable Care Act insurance are powered by Jekyll. This portion of the website has experienced 100% uptime and has functioned perfectly since we launched it in June. The site and our approach is all part of how we build CMS free websites.”
10. 18F
11. –Dave Cole, 2012 “We pushed the boundaries of what we could do with these standards and avoided building server applications at all costs. As a result, we were able to build some of our best work.”
12. –Bruce Lee “The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. It is not the daily increase but daily decrease —  hack away the unessentials!”
13. –Kyle Rush, 2012 “Meet the Obama campaign's $250 million fundraising platform”
14. Enhancements since 2014 • Collections in 2.0: not just a blogging framework any longer. • Build-time improvements, 3.0 • Gem-based themes • New Tags/Filters (help minimize for loops): ‘slug,’ ‘where expression’ • Growing Ecosystem
15. The Expanding Ecosystem
16. Four Pillars of a Website Make life easy for these people and everybody wins content creators designers/ developers site owners end-user audience
17. What content strategy looks like to our audience end-user audience
18. “don’t make me think” Goal
19. Respond to variety of screens with appropriate content
20. What content strategy looks like to our content producers content creators
21. Goals for Content Creators • Logical Structure: Will they “get” it or will they need a manual to figure it out? • Keep things in as few “buckets” as possible. • Be Dry: Don’t Repeat Yourself. • Reduce opportunities for error. content creators
22. • Contributors collection: • name (for main, and each book for translators, etc.) • mage • image credit • banner image • bio • tagline • Posts, if any related • Events collection, only if any coming up • Books collection • title • cover • category (fiction, etc) • was it translated? • related translator, related editor, related contributor • synopsis • message • editions available • links to purchase • Reviews collection (on some pages) • Genre (yaml, in config)
23. _authors _editors _translators _contributors name image bio similar attributes ranslators authors edrs ributors Go in the same They’re all people
25. _books
26. _reviews
27. _articles
28. What content strategy looks like to the Dev/ Design Team designers/ developers
29. The Importance of Experimentation One thing that Jekyll does really well is allow us to experiment with our content structure.
30. The CMS Way
31. –Stephen Hawking “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
33. • A text-based system is much faster to iterate on than wrangling forms in the back-end of a CMS. • And, because every bit of our site, including the content, is in version control, it's quite easy to create an entirly new version of the site, experiment, and throw up a staging copy for review and either fold that work in or discard it. Build & Iterate
34. gist: bit.ly/jekyll-output
35. demo-2016-05-03-01.surge.sh demo-2016-05-03-02.surge.sh demo-2016-05-03-03.surge.sh demo-2016-05-03-04.surge.sh demo-2016-05-03-05.surge.sh
36. Best Thing Ever
37. What about Real Life?
38. Where Jeyll really shines is how it lets us use content however it best suits the content, not the system.
39. Jekyll Core Concept Documents Collections Pages Posts Data YAML JSON CSV internal content, or external
40. Content out via JSON -> Jekyll-get Content In via Tumblr API
41. If all you need is a list, use a list genres: - Fiction - Poetry - Nonfiction - Theater YAML is both human readable and computationally powerful
42. Jekyll Core Concept Documents Collections Pages Posts Data YAML JSON CSV
43. bit.ly/jekyll-content-decision-tree Jekyll Content Decision Tree
44. Jekyll Core Concept Collections may or may not map to a URL. Don’t think of them as pages, but merely objects, structured as documents for the convenience of editing.
45. Documents front matter
46. Setting defaults helps us reduce errors and eliminate repetition
47. Collection Defaults
48. Getting at Collection Metadata config template output to page
49. Defaults for Documents template output to page config
50. This starts to get interesting --- --- key value title: Why is it called *or, The Whale*?
51. What can these be?
52. Output Dates to compare format however you want Can get precise, but this is messy
53. Output Dates to compare Less precise (can’t format date), but much easier
54. _articles Rich Relationships
55. Rich Relationships slug for a contributor’s document
56. Rich Relationships template output to page
57. Rich Relationships output to page
58. Complex Metadata
59. Complex Metadata template
60. Complex Metadata Output to page
61. So we've gone from a simple text document, to an item holding multi-faceted data with dates, images, relationships.
62. “I thought you said we want to reduce errors?”
63. Editing Tools content creators
65. Editing Tools: prose.io
66. Editing Tools: Cloudcannon dates boolean Relationship Single Relationships Multiple
68. The Expanding Ecosystem
69. 71 pt Editing Tools: Contentful
70. Editing Tools: Siteleaf
71. Editing Tools: Netflify CMS
72. Choose your tools wisely
73. {static is} The New Dynamic www.thenewdynamic.org