Moved

I have moved my blog here (from posterous). My choice of [jekyll on] github pages was because I wanted something I can control - something that resides right here on my pc; something I can easily break, move and mess around with.

Fuck that. I chose github pages because it's like some cool 'hacky' thing. And 'hacky' is fun. But there are things I will miss. Autosharing on social networks and posting via email as examples.

Setting up Jekyll on Github pages

Setting up jekyll on github pages is a not a complex thing. Just few steps and you are done.

1. Create your github page

   To create your page, simply create a new github repo with the name: [your username].github.com

2. Clone the repo

   Cd to your choice directory and clone the repo with any name you want. I used blog

   $ git clone https://github.com/[your username]/[your username].github.com.git blog

   I'm cloning over https because my current connection sucks on ssh.

3. Install jekyll

   Install jekyll. What jekyll does is to generate a static website from stuctured markup texts. You will need ruby installed already though. If not, that comes first.

   $ sudo gem install jekyll

   This installs jekyll and other dependencies. Really, if you know what you are doing (which you won't unless you've been doing this for a while), you may not need to install jekyll locally. Github runs jekyll on the server. It is however necessary if you want to run a local version for test, debug and development purpose.

4. Setup your blog

   The interesting thing about jekyll on github pages is the power to design your site in whatever way easily. I went for a boring plain design that took just few minutes. A jekyll site has a standard structure of folders and files. Mine has just _layouts (the standard folder that contains layouts), _posts (the standard folder that contains posts), assets (contains css and images), index.html, posts.html and the config file _config.yml. See nettut's jekyll intro for details about creating this and content.

   My _config.yml file has just a line specifying pygments for code highlighting.

   pygments: true

   I migrated my posterous posts using the posterous migrator that came with jekyll.

   $ ruby -rubygems -e 'require "/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/jekyll-0.12.0/lib/jekyll/migrators/posterous"; Jekyll::Posterous.process(<my_email>, <my_pass>, <api_token>)'

   I had to edit code sections for syntax highlight, fix image urls and "intra-blog" links within the post pages though.

5. Test

   To be sure all is properly set, you can run jekyll locally.

   $ jekyll --server --auto

   --server runs a server on [default] port 4000 so you can preview your site via localhost:4000. --auto lets jekyll should pick up changes made to files so that you don't have to restart the server when you make any file change.

6. Push up

   Once you are done just push up to github.

   $ git add .
   $ git commit -m "--comment--"
   $ git push origin master

   Your site should be live at [your username].github.com in few minutes.

So here (kehers.github.com) is the new blog. I still don't know if to embed a commenting system or not. But whatever.

Thanks to @AFOketunji, @damilare, @dpencilpusher and @micrypt for suggestions of blog alternatives.