The time has come for me to venture into the blogging business. Every day I deal with various software related conecpts, ideas, and problems. I learn from these interactions a lot. What bothers me is that now, after 6 years of professional software development I realize that I don’t really remmber what I’ve been working on in the past years. There are lots of grey areas even if I sit down and revisit some of my past code. In other words the retention isn’t that great.
In this blog I’m going to regularly write on the aforementioned topics. And I hope that I will get better idea about them after formalizing my findings in writing.
For this purpose I set up this blog. It was a challenge of its own to make a platform choice. Nowardays there is a ton of different hosted blogging platforms - Wordpress, Blogger, Tubmblr to name a few. But I happened to stumble upon GiHub:Pages and Jekyll. This neat combo currently drives my blog.
Jekyll is a blow aware static site generator. It runs on a bunch of templated files and outputs static HTML which can be hosted virtually anywhere, and on GitHub:Pages in particular. GitHub:Pages will run Jekyll begind the scenes, and serve the generated site. My job was to set up all the templates and configuration. There is a few prebuilt solutions available for this purpose - Jekyll-Bootstrap or Octopress, but I wanted to go throught this process myself, and build it from scratch. Of course my implementation doesn’t have too many features, but it’s mine :)
In a few words - Jekyll grabs HTML, Markdown, or Textile files, passes them through the specified template and outputs a plain HTML file. The beauty of this approach is that I can write posts in my favorite editor - Vim and just push them to my GitHub repo. GitHub:Pages will then call Jekyll on the collection of files, regenerate the site and promptly publish it.
Such a blog is blazing fast, the hosting is free, and the amount of control over the content and markup is just incredible. And Twitter Bootstrap has everything a wannabe gloggers needs to create pretty posts.
The source code for this blog rests here
Hope that wasn’t too bad for the first time :)
