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Personal brand website builder (engine)

Enjoy blogging with "Markdown" and "Git"

Demo website: Zhang Jian's Blog.

How can I write articles locally with Markdown files and publish them with git push?

At present, Jekyll or Hugo can already meet the above requirements, not perfectly.

personal-brand-website-builder can also meet the above requirements, yet it is different in a few ways.

In what ways is personal-brand-website-builder better than Jekyll or Hugo?

1. The blog posts generated by Jekyll or Hugo are static, while personal-brand-website-builder is a dynamic blog engine.
   • The functions of static blogs are very limited.
   • In dynamic blog personal-brand-website-builder, email subscriptions are currently integrated, and in the future, resume, portfolio, comments, likes, reading counts, online payments, etc. will also be supported.
   • Also, you can add some customized features to your blog.
   • You might say, what if I don't know how to program in Ruby?
     • Two years ago, this would be a problem, but now, we have AI, and you can let AI help you implement some small features!
     • If there is an error, tell AI and let AI correct it.
2. For those who are not familiar with Jekyll or Hugo, it is even difficult to even find a good-looking theme.
   • personal-brand-website-builder currently supports one beautiful free theme (8 color options included), and more themes will be added in the future.
3. Jekyll or Hugo's documentation is a lot of pages long. Who can explain everything in just one page?
   • personal-brand-website-builder can. For information on how to publish a post using Markdown and Git, please read markdown-blog using the personal-brand-website-builder approach.
4. A blog post can be translated into multiple languages and displayed on the blog. This feature is currently not supported by any blog engine. However, personal-brand-website-builder has already supported it, allowing your articles to reach global users. Eight languages: English, Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian are already supported by default, and other languages can be easily supported.
5. For building a personal brand, it is not enough to just have a blog. It is better to have a resume and a portfolio. In fact, a blog is not the most important function, but a resume and a portfolio are. In the next version, we will launch the resume function.

What is the cost of using personal-brand-website-builder?

Many programmers already use a server, and usually, that server is not fully utilized.

You can install personal-brand-website-builder on this server without worrying about port 80/443 being used by another website. In the installation document, I have pointed out how to perfectly solve this problem that does not actually exist.

So your cost increase may be only $2/month.

Why don’t developers blog much anymore?

• After using GitHub Pages (powered by Jekyll), they rarely write blogs. Why?
• IMO, ordinary blog systems can no longer create much value for bloggers! Those blogs are not designed to bring value to bloggers.
• Take myself as an example, my GitHub Pages' Zhang Jian's old blog is not sexy at all, so I can't get excited about writing.

personal-brand-website-builder: A blog engine focused on bringing value to developers

• You can see Zhang Jian's new blog (based on personal-brand-website-builder) is well-designed.
• I started expecting clients to pay for my services directly on my blog!
• Through the blog, I convey a message to potential customers: I am an expert in web development, algorithms, and game addiction!

Deploy personal-brand-website-builder on a server

If you want to deploy personal-brand-website-builder on a server, please read deploy_on_CentOS10.md.

Install personal-brand-website-builder on your local computer

The following content is mainly for installation under macOS locally. For other operating systems, the installation process is similar.

Install Ruby

The personal-brand-website-builder is developed based on Ruby version 3.3.x, but other versions should also work.

• Use Homebrew to install Ruby if you are a casual user and won't be using Ruby frequently.

  brew install ruby

• Ruby developers use a Ruby version manager to install Ruby.

  • ruby-build
  • ruby-install
  • asdf

Clone 'personal-brand-website-builder' repository and install Ruby gems

git clone https://github.com/PersonalBranding/personal-brand-website-builder.git
cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
bundle install

Set credentials

cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
# This file contains all the credentials that need to be set.
cat config/credentials.yml.example # Set "all" of them with the next command:
# After saving it, "config/credentials.yml.enc" and "config/master.key" will be created.
# In order for the modified credentials to take effect, you need to restart the Rails web server.
EDITOR="vim" bin/rails credentials:edit

All items shown in config/credentials.yml.example need to be set!

If you are still not sure how to set some items, you can use the default values in config/credentials.yml.example first, and then set the values correctly according to the relevant instructions when you find that the relevant functions do not work.

Prepare SQLite database

cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
rails db:migrate # The database file is `./storage/development.sqlite3`. Running it has no side effects.
rails db:seed # Running it has no side effects.

Install theme

Read docs/install_theme.md.

Start Rails web server

cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
rails assets:precompile # This needs to be executed whenever any assets are changed. Running it has no side effects.
rails s # Start Rails web server.

Visit http://localhost:3000/.

Create the Admin User

cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
vim db/seeds.rb

Uncomment the first few lines of code to create the Admin User.

rails db:seed
git restore db/seeds.rb

Use this email address and password to log in on http://localhost:3000/admin.

Send email via SMTP

Please follow the instructions in docs/send_email_via_smtp_guide.md to complete this step.

Start "Solid Queue" to handle background jobs

Blog posts, images, files synchronization, sending emails, generating thumbnails, etc. all require background tasks to be started!

cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
rm public/assets/.manifest.json
rails assets:precompile # You need to restart Rails web server to make the changes take effect.
bin/jobs # start it

• First, use email address and password to log in on http://localhost:3000/admin.
• Second, use this username and password to log in on http://localhost:3000/jobs to see if there are failed tasks.
  • The username and password can be obtained by running EDITOR="vim" bin/rails credentials:edit.

Create and install your "GitHub App" to sync local "markdown-blog" repository's files' changes to blog website

Here, the blog website is your local Rails web server. If you deploy_on_CentOS10.md, the blog website is your real web server.

Please read markdown-blog if you are not familiar with how to publish a blog using Markdown and Git.

Please follow the instructions in GitHub_App.md to complete this step.

Automatically generate thumbnails for images

Click to view

You need to install [ImageMagick](https://imagemagick.org/).
If you don't care about thumbnails when debugging locally, you can skip this step and only install *ImageMagick* on the server.

# Warning: This command may take a long time and download a lot of packages!
brew install imagemagick

Run tests

Run bundle exec rspec spec.

Troubleshooting

cd /path/to/personal-brand-website-builder
tail -n 200 log/development.log # This is the log of Rails web server

# If you are testing background jobs related features, you can use it to check if the job process is running.
# If you didn't see any process listed, you can start it by reading the instructions above.
ps -ef|grep solid

Setting up your website

Read setup_website.md.