Blog Baby Steps - Step 01
in Blog
This is going to be interesting.
I have evolved or devolved a bit with regards to blogging. Blogging serves many purposes. But if your primary purpose is something akin to a diary or a personal log for future reference, anything akin to WordPress ends up being a bit of overkill.
I really resonated with the comments in the Jekyll-Github-Blog guide. It isn’t that hard at all to setup a LAMP stack or whatever to get a blog going. And it’s not that hard to manage the migrations, updates, changes in database, hardware changes, dying disk drives, etc. But at some point, you ask yourself “why am I doing this?”.
Here’s what I have been doing lately:
- $ vi this_or_that_logfile
- !!date (punch in that timestamp)
- write text
I left off the last bullet which would have said something like save file and exit vi… for a reason… ‘cause I never do that. Just like having Firefox open with dozens of tabs, with tabbed terminals, I can just leave the stinking text file open… forever.
I like what I’m seeing with Jekyll. But it seems pretty clear to me that I’m going to end up wrapping my usual practice up to auto-generate the post files. We’ll see…
In any case, I need to continue taking Jekyll for a spin - especially with regards how to use it with GitHub pages. So what are my next few baby steps? Hang on… let me slide over to my aforementioned text file and see what I’d noted…
Ah yes….
- Follow the guide to create a blog… DONE the rest for tomorrow.
- Add a post
- Create a development branch
- Use Jekyll locally on laptop
- Use Jekyll locally on home network
- Experiment with themes
Now why is markdown doing that? Sigh… well, I’m learning markdown here too. But seriously, it looks nasty to start a numbered list with lower case roman numerals. OK… a bug. Lovely. Glad I picked up a markdown editor despite how likely I will be using vi or any ole’ text editor. Unless… this is a problem only IN the markdown editor… No. This editor supports multiple “styles” and this works fine in styles other than “GitHub”.
Sheesh. Let’s push it and check…
OK. Good news and bad news. As I expected, the GitHub hosted rendition of the Jekyll produced blog is using whatever CSS I specified or none at all. So it does what it would do as raw HTML. The bad news? The HTML produced is different. Sigh… so markdown is apparently widely open to interpretation? Hmm…