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     (        (     *   ) )\ )                (         )\ )  )\ )  
     )\       )\  ` )  /((()/( (   (   (      )\   (   (()/( (()/(  
  ((((_)(   (((_)  ( )(_))/(_)))\  )\  )\   (((_)  )\   /(_)) /(_)) 
   )\ _ )\  )\___ (_(_())(_)) ((_)((_)((_)  )\___ ((_) (_))  (_))   
   (_)_\(_)((/ __||_   _||_ _|\ \ / / | __|((/ __|| __|| |   | |    
    / _ \   | (__   | |   | |  \ V /  | _|  | (__ | _| | |__ | |__  
   /_/ \_\   \___|  |_|  |___|  \_/   |___|  \___||___||____||____|

activecell.com

The site is delivered in static form using the following tools/services:

• jekyll for site generation based on markdown and templates
• jammit and jammit plugin for jekyll for the asset pipeline
• s3cmd for sync to Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 for static file storage
• Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network
• dnsimple for world-class dns

More information can be found in this post by Max Masnick.

The reason for the move to these tools was simple.

Originally, we had an entirely static site, and it was a bear to maintain. When we want to change a footer element, it needed to be updated in 30 places. When we had a new post, it needed to be created based on an existing page. Woof.

Then we moved to Wordpress, and all those problems went away, but they created a thousand other problems around performance and maintenance. The site kept going down for one reason or another, and it was clear we had a complicated answer to a simple problem.

Jekyll provides a middle ground. It's simple and source-controlled. It's templated, and it works with s3 simply and easily. With the plugins and S3/Cloudfront, we get top-tier performance for all our non-html assets (js, css, images).

Awesome.

Contributing & Deploying

Contributing is easy:

1. Clone the repo to your local machine
2. Make sensible changes
3. Add any new images to /assets/img and reference like src="{{ 'assets/img/new_img.jpg' | cdn }}"
4. Edit CSS/JS as required and ensure any new JS/CSS are listed in _assets.yml for packaging
5. Run jekyll --server --auto to view the generated site locally at localhost http://localhost:4000/ and to automatically re-generate pages based on your changes
6. Run 'rake deploy' to deploy the generated site to production
7. Commit changes push to origin

Note: Hotfixes and minor changes can be pushed directly to master. Anything heavy, or if there's even a question, and please submit a pull request for the update.

The site will continue to evolve, but see jekyll documentation for information about how to generate content for the site.