Moved the blog again - GitHub Pages
“What?” you say. “Another blog post already? — It’s only been 11 months since the last one…..”
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…. I’ve been busy. In addition to the exciting career in software development, I’ve been studying Massage Therapy – I’ll be a Licensed Massage Therapist is a couple months. And with the weekends often taken up with photography, there’s not much time left for blogging.
I’ve also switched my ISP, and no longer have a fixed IP address, which meant I could no longer host the site from my home computer. Just as well, I had a lot of stability problems doing that.
However, just about that time, I learned about hosting blogs on GitHub, so I thought I’ve give it a try. I’m still working on how to import the comments from the old site (although over nearly ten years, there are only about a dozen comments worth carrying over)
Of the things I’ve learned:
- If there’s a problem building the site, GitHub merely says : ‘page build failed.’ with no indication what the problem was or even on what page the problem occurred.
- This is because they expect you to be running the site builder program, (Jekyll – so named because it’s designers consider it a monster, which itself is built on the Liquid templating language)
- Jekyll & Liquid are both Ruby programs, one of which (never figured out which one), requires not only the Ruby runtime, but also the Ruby Development Kit.
- Neither Ruby nor the DevKit can deal with paths with spaces, so don’t try putting it in the “C:\Program Files” folder with all your other executable.
- Both the Ruby runtime & the DevKit need to be added to the PATH. (But for the runtime, it’s the \bin folder, while for the DevKit it’s the main folder)
- Jekyll spits most of it’s errors to stderr, but some to stdout, It also spits out hundreds of lines so it best to redirect both streams to files.
- When GitHub builds the site, they do not run any plug-ins, so if you found any plug-in based add on for GitHub Pages, it’s assumed (but never mentioned) that you’ll be running Jekyll offline, and then uploading the generated pages.
- pygments, one of the plug-ins that GitHub does run, for formatting code snippets, isn’t worth the effort. Use MarkDown’s indented-line-are-code formatting for very short samples, and GitHub’s Gists for longer ones.
- Posts are written in MarkDown – you actually get to choose between several different Markdown processor (they offer no help on the differences), with a “yaml” header on top.
- YAML - is just a simple list of
key: value lines offset on top & bottom by three dashes.
title and layout are the important keys the YAML header. You can also include categories but there’s not much you can do with it without a 3rd-party plug-in and external processing.- Because the YAML syntax uses a colon, you cannot have a colon in the value part of the line. (e.g., you cannot have a colon in your posts title)