It´s summer and I have some free time so starting a new github blog. Yay! Slightly scary as I have never used github (or git) for anything serious before - I use svn and mercurial at work. Anyways, how hard can it be? So let´s dive in.
Setup so far
- The blog is created using Jekyll - a static site generator. I order to use this you must have Ruby with the Ruby gem package manager installed.
- Found a Jekyll theme that looked nice from Michael Rose (thanks!), see the Minimal Mistakes repo.
- Following the theme instructions I have forked and renamed the repo as https://github.com/bavalde/bav-github-blog.git
- I must have made a mistake when deleting and then creating a new gh-branch (idea was to start with a clean working copy) because git started barfing at me so I did a hard reset origin -> gh-pages.
- getting Jekyll and friends installed and working was very easy: “sudo gem install bundler” followed by “bundle install” and as far as I can see it´s just working.
- I´m writing this on a fairly recent osx-upgraded Mac, but github claimed my git was old so I grabbed a new git from https://git-scm.com/. Seems strange, but whatever, I´m fine with that if you need me to.
- This setup was all done in a few minuttes (excluding reading/understanding time) and to build and view the sample site is as easy as “jekyll build” and/or “jekyll serve”.
- I´m not into serious vim (so far I have only learned enough vim to do basic editing when required). I guess an editor with git integration would be nice and I´m trying out Microsofts Code editor - looks nice so far. I´m sure there are alternatives, but it looks like a faster perhaps less crashy ;) Atom editor for me and with a nice Visual Studio feel.
- The site/blog as such needs a major cleanup, currently there are many demo posts and leftovers from the repo I cloned, sorry about that, but the basics seems to be up and running.
- As I´m writing this I have Jekyll serving in a Terminal window and every time I save an edited file the site is automatically updated (re-built) and can be viewed as localhost:4000. I think I can get used to this, pretty slick workflow.
Summary
Basically, this setup was faster and easier than I could have imaged. I´m impressed with the Jekyll and ruby/gem utils and to me the theme from Michael Rose looks pretty nice.
Next Steps
Now I´m going the eat a macrell. What a booring fish and it´s all over the place for the time beeing. I wich it was a proper cod or something. Then I might actually write a proper blogpost.