My Set-Up For Blogging

Nothing better to kick this blog off than explaining how I set it up!

Choices

I went with github-pages because I wanted something fast & easy, backed by a CDN, and obviously a platform where I still own the content. A big plus that I can tweak and tinker with everything. Could I write my own site from scratch and host it on the cloud? Yes, and I still might. But this works for now and will be easy to port all the content if I do.

Initial Set-up

  1. jekyll new blog
  2. Edit Gemfile, comment out jekyll, uncomment github-pages.
  3. Update _config.yml with details, comment out theme cause we’re importing all the files manually.
  4. git clone https://github.com/poole/hyde.git ../
    cp -r ../hyde/_layouts/ ./
    cp ../hyde/*.html ./
    cp ../hyde/atom.xml ./
    cp -r ../hyde/public/ ./
    cp -r ../hyde/_includes ./
    

Currently

As alway, I’m using Vim and will until the day I die. I’ll probably use it to finalize my will.

In order to try things out locally, I needed to run a local web server for github pages. Dockerhub user starefossen wrote a nice little Dockerfile for exactly this: https://hub.docker.com/r/starefossen/github-pages/

So to see live updates of my changes I just run:

docker run -t --rm --name ghp -v "$PWD":/usr/src/app -p "4000:4000" starefossen/github-pages

Future Improvements

I’ll definitely write a quick ruby script to generate a skeleton markdown post with the current date/time and proper front matter.