#Jekyll

If you have done and OS X/macOS development, especially any that predated the Mac App Store, you are probably aware of Sparkle. Even if you haven’t done any development, you have probably used Sparkle because it was basically the de facto method of providing update functionality in Mac Apps, and even to this day is still widely used on many apps distributed outside the official App Store. Updates are distributed to applications by means of an “appcast”, an extension of the RSS specification containing information about updates. RSS itself is based on XML, which means you can build them just like you would build any other published document. The problem comes when you start having a lot of updates in an appcast. Maintaining a large file can become difficult. But fortunately, using Jekyll collections, we can generate a single appcast using multiple files that are much easier to maintain. And, as an added bonus, we can use that same data to generate a download and changelog page from the same data.

I moved the dystill website to Jekyll and Bootstrap. This was pretty simple overall, since the site is just one page. It was more a task for converting the custom CSS I wrote to use the matching Boostrap libs. I also added the neat little ubiquitous “Fork me on Github” ribbon you see on a lot of sites. Go check it out at dystill.org.

So you may notice that robpeck.com now has an entirely new look. It’s not just a new look, but a ground-up re-architecture of my blog.