Hungry Academy application part 2

README.md

This is part two of my application to Hungry Academy. Part one lives at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ze-dcVY05k

Recently I made a pull request to improve Octopress' pullquote plugin.

The improvement happened in pullquote.rb and _typography.scss. These files allow users to create pullquotes as demonstrated in the documentation. Pullquotes are by default right-aligned. I wanted to be able to use pullquotes with either left or right alignment. I worked to modify existing code to allow left aligning pullquotes.

I added a condition which assigns a very simple regular expression to the existing initialization which assigns a variable to "left" if the liquid tag contains the word "left", and "right" otherwise. The plugin creates an html tag with alignment indicated in the class.

Then, I edited the Sass to interpret the new class to float left and mirror the margins of its right-aligned counterpart.

If I had it to do again, I would have made my initial pull request a little later when I had sufficiently cleaned up my code. This pull request taught me a number of things, including how to actually make a pull request, a little bit of how regular expressions work in Ruby, and how to read and modify Sass. I wrote about this project in my blog post My First Three Pull Requests.

As this is not my original work, please review the diffs on my pull request.

_typography.scss

# Normally kept in Octopress' .themes/classic/sass/base/ directory.
$blockquote: $type-border !default;
$mono: Menlo, Monaco, "Andale Mono", "lucida console", "Courier New", monospace;

// Fonts
.heading {
  font-family: "PT Serif", "Georgia", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif;
}
.sans { font-family: "PT Sans", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif; }
.serif { font-family: "PT Serif", Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; }
.mono { font-family: $mono; }

body > header h1 {
  font-size: 2.2em;
  @extend .heading;
  font-weight: normal;
  line-height: 1.2em;
  margin-bottom: 0.6667em;
}

body {
  line-height: 1.5em;
  color: $text-color;
  @extend .serif;
}
h1 {
  font-size: 2.2em;
  line-height: 1.2em;
}

@media only screen and (min-width: 992px) {
  body { font-size: 1.15em; }
  h1 { font-size: 2.6em; line-height: 1.2em; }
}

#{headings()}{
  @extend .heading;
  text-rendering: optimizelegibility;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
  font-weight: bold;
}
h2, section h1 {
  font-size: 1.5em;
}
h3, section h2, section section h1 {
  font-size: 1.3em;
}
h4, section h3, section section h2, section section section h1 {
  font-size: 1em;
}
h5, section h4, section section h3 {
  font-size: .9em;
}
h6, section h5, section section h4, section section section h3 {
  font-size: .8em;
}
p, blockquote, ul, ol { margin-bottom: 1.5em; }

ul { list-style-type: disc;
  ul { list-style-type: circle;
    ul { list-style-type: square; }}}

ol { list-style-type: decimal;
  ol { list-style-type: lower-alpha;
    ol { list-style-type: lower-roman; }}}

ul, ol { &, ul, ol { margin-left: 1.3em; }}

strong { font-weight: bold; }

em { font-style: italic; }

sup, sub { font-size: 0.8em; position: relative;  display: inline-block; }
sup { top: -.5em; }
sub { bottom: -.5em; }

q { font-style: italic;
  &:before { content: "\201C"; }
  &:after { content: "\201D"; }
}

em, dfn { font-style: italic; }

strong, dfn { font-weight: bold; }

del, s { text-decoration: line-through; }

abbr, acronym { border-bottom: 1px dotted; cursor: help; }

pre, code, tt { @extend .mono; }

sub, sup { line-height: 0; }

hr { margin-bottom: 0.2em; }

small { font-size: .8em; }

big { font-size: 1.2em; }

blockquote {
  $bq-margin: 1.2em;
  font-style: italic;
  position: relative;
  font-size: 1.2em;
  line-height: 1.5em;
  padding-left: 1em;
  border-left: 4px solid rgba($text-color-light, .5);
  cite {
    font-style: italic;
    a { color: $text-color-light !important; word-wrap: break-word; }
    &:before { content: '\2014'; padding:{right: .3em; left: .3em;} color: $text-color-light; }
  }
  @media only screen and (min-width: 992px) {
    padding-left: 1.5em;
    border-left-width: 4px;
  }
}

.pullquote-right:before, .pullquote-left:before {
  /* Reset metrics. */
  padding: 0;
  border: none;

  /* Content */
  content: attr(data-pullquote);

  /* Pull out to the right, modular scale based margins. */
  float: right;
  width: 45%;
  margin: .5em 0 1em 1.5em;

  /* Baseline correction */
  position: relative;
  top: 7px;
  font-size: 1.4em;
  line-height: 1.45em;
}

.pullquote-left:before {

  /* Make left pullquotes align properly. */
  float: left;
  margin: .5em 1.5em 1em 0;

}

/* @extend this to force long lines of continuous text to wrap */
.force-wrap {
  white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;
  white-space: -pre-wrap;
  white-space: -o-pre-wrap;
  white-space: pre-wrap;
  word-wrap: break-word;
}

pullquote.rb

# Normally kept in Octopress' plugins directory.
#
# Author: Brandon Mathis
# Based on the semantic pullquote technique by Maykel Loomans at http://miekd.com/articles/pull-quotes-with-html5-and-css/
#
# Outputs a span with a data-pullquote attribute set from the marked pullquote. Example:
#
#   {% pullquote %} 
#     When writing longform posts, I find it helpful to include pullquotes, which help those scanning a post discern whether or not a post is helpful.
#     It is important to note, {" pullquotes are merely visual in presentation and should not appear twice in the text. "} That is why it is prefered
#     to use a CSS only technique for styling pullquotes.
#   {% endpullquote %}
#   ...will output...
#   <p>
#     <span data-pullquote="pullquotes are merely visual in presentation and should not appear twice in the text.">
#       When writing longform posts, I find it helpful to include pullquotes, which help those scanning a post discern whether or not a post is helpful.
#       It is important to note, pullquotes are merely visual in presentation and should not appear twice in the text. This is why a CSS only approach #       for styling pullquotes is prefered.
#     </span>
#   </p>
#
#  Strand's modification adds the ability to call this plugin with {% pullquote left %} which duplicates the current behavior of the pullquote plugin, with a left float and appropriate margins.
#  Note: this version of the plugin now creates pullquotes with the class of pullquote-right by default

module Jekyll

  class PullquoteTag < Liquid::Block
    def initialize(tag_name, markup, tokens)
      markup =~ /left/i ? @align = "left" : @align = "right"
      super
    end

    def render(context)
      output = super
      if output.join =~ /\{"\s*(.+)\s*"\}/
        @quote = $1
         "<span class='pullquote-#{@align}' data-pullquote='#{@quote}'>#{output.join.gsub(/\{"\s*|\s*"\}/, '')}</span>"
      else
        return "Surround your pullquote like this {\" text to be quoted \"}"
      end
    end
  end
end

Liquid::Template.register_tag('pullquote', Jekyll::PullquoteTag)