JRScott812.GitHub.io

Personal portfolio site built with Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages.

Local development

Requirements: Ruby (3.x), Bundler.

gem install bundler
bundle install

Preview the site (recommended)

Do not open files in _site/ directly in your browser — paths like /assets/css/style.css only work over HTTP.

Use the local dev server instead:

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload --config _config.yml,_config_dev.yml

On Windows you can double-click or run serve.bat.

Then open http://127.0.0.1:4000 (not a file:// path).

_config_dev.yml sets url to http://127.0.0.1:4000 so SEO/canonical tags match local preview. Production builds use the main _config.yml only.

Build without serving

bundle exec jekyll build

Output goes to _site/. To preview a build folder, serve it over HTTP:

cd _site
python -m http.server 4000

Then open http://127.0.0.1:4000

After the first bundle install, commit the generated Gemfile.lock for reproducible builds.

Adding projects

Create a markdown file in _projects/ with front matter. Set published: true to show it on the Projects page.

Example:

---
title: My Project
category: Browser Extensions
image: https://example.com/logo.png
excerpt: Short description shown on the project card.
links:
  - label: GitHub
    url: https://github.com/JRScott812/my-project
    style: primary
  - label: Live demo
    url: https://example.com
    style: secondary
published: true
tags:
  - javascript
  - chrome-extension
---

Optional longer description for the project detail page.

Front matter fields

Field	Required	Description
title	Yes	Project name
category	Yes	Section heading on the Projects page (e.g. Browser Extensions, Websites/Web Apps, Misc)
excerpt	Yes	Short summary for cards and SEO
image	No	Logo or preview URL, or a local path like /assets/images/my-logo.svg
links	No	List of { label, url, style } buttons (style: primary or secondary)
published	No	Set to true to include on the site (defaults to hidden if omitted)
tags	No	Optional tags shown on the project detail page

Projects appear grouped by category on /projects/. Each file also gets a detail page at /projects/<filename>/.

Site configuration

• Production URL: https://jrscott812.github.io (set in _config.yml)
• SEO tags via jekyll-seo-tag; sitemap via jekyll-sitemap
• Sitemap URL: https://jrscott812.github.io/sitemap.xml (generated at build — not committed to the repo)
• robots.txt points crawlers to that sitemap

The sitemap is built automatically and includes all pages plus each project in _projects/. To preview locally:

bundle exec jekyll build
# open _site/sitemap.xml

Deployment

The site deploys via GitHub Actions using Node 24–compatible action versions (checkout@v6, upload-pages-artifact@v5, deploy-pages@v5).

One-time setup (if you still use the legacy “Deploy from branch” builder):

1. Push this repo to main
2. Go to Settings → Pages → Build and deployment
3. Set Source to GitHub Actions
4. Select the Deploy Jekyll site to Pages workflow

That replaces GitHub’s built-in pages-build-deployment workflow, which still uses Node 20 actions and triggers the deprecation warning.