Tools

Couple of bits and pieces on Jekyll stuff today… I am tweaking the outline of the site, so i am surfing around finding stuff… here is what i have found

• Host a static site on Amazon S3: Interesting idea, and something i would look into eventually… And with the help of CloudFront you could host your whole blog on a CDN!
• Rake tasks for Jekyll: Rake is the Ruby version of make… and a RakeFile can have tasks, which are in Ruby… They can do, from what i can gather, pretty much anything… So, some examples of what you can do with them are linked here… I especially like the New Post generator… very handy!
• Jekyll Plugins: Various different plugins for Jekyll… I am interested in a few of these, mainly the Generate_projects one, which generates a page for your projects based on your GitHub projects… very cool stuff…
• Strictly speaking, this is not just a Jekyll how to, but Migrating from WordPress to Jekyll is a handy read. my main blog, my podcast and photography blog both run WordPress. migrating them to Jekyll would mean i could move them directly to a CDN and make things a lot faster… Maybe something i plan doing soon…

If you have any tips or tricks, why not leave a comment and i can add them to the post.

[UPDATED] someone asked in the comments if there was an binary build for this file. there is now! http://handbrakecluster.codeplex.com now hosts the code and binaries, and will soon have help files and documentation.

A few days back, i wrote a post titled Powershell + Handbrake + AppleTV + iTunes = Automatic TV. ish. In it i included a block of Powershell code to bulk convert TV shows from whatever format you had them in to a M4V format for the AppleTV. Well, as they say “If necessity is the mother of all invension, lazyness must be the father”. I have a lot of shows i wanted converted to the AppleTV, so i built something. Its called HandBrake Cluster and is written in .NET 4.5, uses MSMQ and Handbrake to do the processing. The workflow is as follows:

I have an AppleTV in the house (3, actually) and I am very happy with its ease of use, size and cost. You can’t argue with the small price!

I also have a lot of content that works great with the AppleTV in iTunes, but I have content which does not work so great with the AppleTV. So, I needed to find a way to convert files quickly and easily. that’s where PowerShell and Handbrake come in.