Weekend of jekyll, gist and d3

For some time the jekyll project drew my attention. Had the chance to really check it out today. After figuring out exactly what it is for, it was very exciting to set up for jdutta.github.io. I use wordpress for my personal blog, which is probably fine for its purpose, but I have been leaning towards a tech blog which could be updated by pushing to git. So far a clean solution seems to be github pages powered by jekyll. For the theme, I chose Zack Holman’s Left.

I also set up my a new repository d3viz to develop and play with custom d3 visualizations. Given the choices, deciding where to host the demo pages is always a headache. One option is to use a github page for the d3viz repository, but then it would mean copying code from master branch to the orphan gh-pages branch. I was almost going that way when I found what Mike Bostock’s bl.ocks.org offers. It is a convenient mechanism to host an index.html, complete with code highlighting, by putting it in a gist in github. For example, https://gist.github.com/jdutta/9458987 becomes live on http://bl.ocks.org/jdutta/9458987, just like magic.

The demo links are available in the d3viz wiki.