I have had a web site forever - but not really a blog. Guess it is time to experiment with the date-driven style and see what I think. At least with Octopress (or Jekyll), I don’t have to give up my beloved emacs + git for an unwieldy CMS. (Confession: other than some tedium remembering the not-quite-html tag syntax, I really love DocBook for collecting my notes, how-tos, etc.)
Following the instructions on the Octopress setup page, I cloned the repository from Github. When I cd’ed into the directory, RVM asked me if I would approve the .rvmrc file that required Ruby 1.9.2. I am trying to move all my development to Ruby 1.9.3 so I would prefer not to install 1.9.2 if I don’t have to. I looked around (esp. through the issues queue) to try to see why the requirement is for 1.9.2 instead of just > 1.9.1. All I could find was a ticket that said “just use RVM and install 1.9.2 already!” but didn’t enumerate any issues with 1.9.3. So I may end up falling back but at least for the initial setup, I am going to push ahead with 1.9.2-p194 which is the current stable patch level.
rvm gemset create octopress
bundle install
rake installAll seems to have installed and run just fine - even the dependencies like posix-spawn, fast-stemmer, ffi, and rdiscount which have native extensions. So I updated my copy of the .rvmrc file with my ruby and gemset.
Next I followed the instructions for setting up
rsync deployment -
putting my information in the Rakefile. And
configured a few options to
add my GitHub and Twitter feeds to show in the sidebar. (Still need to
figure out why the GitHub section still says “Status updating…”) and
then used the supplied rake task
to create the file for this post. The preview (rake preview)
looks great!
It remains to be seen if I am going to like markdown. Having to close tags is tedious, but in the end, it is often less time consuming than looking up the alternative syntax for the non-html markups. But looks like I can use at least some regular html tags inside this markdown file if I want to.