This site is built with Middleman and Bower. Middleman compiles partials, sass, and coffeescript, into optimized html, css, and javascript. Bower is used to manage css and javascript third party dependencies.
You'll need at minimum Ruby (2.0.0 suggested), RubyGems, and Bundler to get
started. Once you have all that, just run bundle install to install Middleman
and all it's dependencies.
Middleman comes with a simple server. Run middleman to start it up. That will
run on localhost:4567, which you can hit from your browser -- open localhost:4567. It will refresh automatically as you change files.
You can build out the site with rake build, but you probably won't need this.
This happens when you run the development server, and when you publish (below).
middleman article TITLE
Once you're happy with your changes, commit them and run rake publish, which
will run the build step, add all the files to the 'gh-pages' branch and push.
If you want to add additional front-end dependencies (jQuery, Underscore.js,
etc.), please use Bower. For that, you'll need node, npm, then npm install -g bower. Then you should be able to do something like bower install jquery --save.