Ghost pages

The updates I’m going to be sharing will mostly be for the projects I’m working on. In this case, it will just be the current website and the Nutter Home Designs website. Sometime soon, I’m going to be working on some Ruby on rails apps so I’ll share those as I’m working through them.

When I first set up this website, I was given a few pages to start off with, such as an index.md page, an elements.md page, and a landing.md page. The elements.md page is just a resource to tell you which styles, fonts, and colors are being used on the website. The landing.md page is there as a reference to see how the pages are layed out–I think.

Anyway, I added an about page and saw it displayed on the index page as a tile. I tried to add a new page for projects but didn’t see it show. To try and get the page up, I quickly edited the elements page to say what I wanted it to say and then continued getting the rest of the website setup.

Last night, I decided to circle back and get things sorted out with the elements page. The first thing I tried to do is rename the elements file to projects, but that didn’t work. It displayed an empty tile that linked directly to the site’s main CSS file.

Afterward, I renamed the file back to elements and then dug through all of the _layouts folders and _includes folders in the project. There was no apparent reference to the elements file. I was perplexed.

Eventually, I created a brand new project file. Then copied the contents of the elements file to the projects file. Updated the frontmatter in the projects file and bingo; I could now see the tile appear on the index page. BUT, the old elements tile is also displayed. Getting closer here but was beyond confused.

With this project, the creator added a couple of options in the frontmatter for pages and posts, giving the option to show_tile: true/false and show-nav: true/false. I changed the frontmatter on the elements page to false for both and then set to true on the projects page. I refreshed the index page and noticed some improvement. The elements page was removed from the top navigation but displayed as a blank space on the index page.

Ok, I’m getting closer. I started looking at other files in the _includes folder to see how they were coded. There’s a conditional block at the top of this page that loops through all of the pages and posts and then displays them if they’re anything but false. That’s weird. Here’s an example of what it looked like:

for post in site.posts limit:site.tiles-count if site.tiles-source == 'posts' and post.show_tile != false

It seems like this should do the trick if the show_tile frontmatter was not set as false, but that’s not the case here for some reason. So I changed the logic to only look at true. Hit refresh on the webpage, and BOOM, it worked. I can now see the correct tiles display on the index page. What a relief. Who knew it was just an issue with the logic.

The next update I want to make is adding some additional images/icons to the website, but I haven’t exactly decided how I want to do that and what images those will be.