I’m No Doctor of Jekyll

Image credit: onepinkhippo’s “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”

While sick during the week I decided to explore how I could map a domain on GitHub and get up and running with Jekyll, the static-file blog application that runs on GitHub. It took me most of the day, but as I already discussed a bit on the Jekyll blog I set up, it went a long way towards helping me wrap my had around GitHub. I’ve been meaning to do this since spending time with Audrey Watters and Kin Lane over the past two years. They continue to inspire.

It’s a pretty different blogging experience. You write your post as a text file, and the layout looks something like what you’ll find at the bottom of this post. You then commit and synch the locally written post to the GitHub repository through a GitHub client and the post is updated. I actually haven’t written a new post yet, I just edited the existing post template post.

In order to get Jekyll working I had to install RubyGems packager locally, and then I was playing in command line to preview my post locally before committing it. Publishing with Jekyll makes you feel pretty techie, and that can give someone like me much needed confidence. My next projects are as follows:

  • Figure out how to write a full post in Jekyll from scratch and update my About page
  • Fork Kin’s Reclaim Your Domain site (already done) and use that as the template to build my own
  • To that end, get a jimgroom.reclaimyourdomain.org page up and running (can you setup the subdomain Kin ? ; )

Actually, the above three items are probably pretty doable, so I think I’m off to a good start trying to catch up on a lot of the ideas that have been swirling around my head for the last two years. Next up after GitHub is Docker, and I also have to catchup with the great Tim Owens on his experience at IndieWebCamp this weekend. Things are moving, and I love that feeling. I’ll be ready to start preaching again soon, I just need to wrap my head around a few more things.


layout: post
title: “Welcome to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Bava!”
date: 2014-10-09 23:38:32
categories: testing

Welcome to my first experiment with posting using Jekyll. I’ve been playing with GitHub all day between getting jimgroom.me mapped on GitHub and wrapping my head around Jekyll. I have to say the process has given me a far better sense of how GitHub works, something I’ve be trying to push myself to learn for over a year now.

I wish I could explain what GitHub and Jekyll are exactly, but I have to admit I am still fuzzy. But if you asked me I would say GitHub is a versioning control application that folks figured out can do a whole lot more. Namely, it can run the Ruby application Jekyll which is a simple, static file-based blog application. You install Jekyll locally on your computer, and through the GitHub client can edit, preview locally, and commit edits and the like.

It’s a bit overkill for a blog, but I’m also very new to it all. I imagine there is much more that can be done that I have no concept of.

Here are some useful sites I used in the process of mapping a domain to GitHub and getting Jekyll up and running as the GitHub blog/CMS:

This page takes you through setting up a custom domain with GitHub pages:
[https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/](https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/)

This page helped me troubleshoot my custom domain issues when mapping to Github.
[https://help.github.com/articles/my-custom-domain-isn-t-working/](https://help.github.com/articles/my-custom-domain-isn-t-working/)

This blog post helped me actually see the DNS settings I needed to map my domain to GitHub cleanly.
[http://davidensinger.com/2013/03/setting-the-dns-for-github-pages-on-namecheap/](http://davidensinger.com/2013/03/setting-the-dns-for-github-pages-on-namecheap/)

This page helped me get up and running with Jekyll.
[https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages/](https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages/)

Stackoverflow helped me find an answer to the permissions issue I was having when trying to install RubyGems (the Ruby packager that installs Jekyll):
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14607193/installing-gem-or-updating-rubygems-fails-with-permissions-error](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14607193/installing-gem-or-updating-rubygems-fails-with-permissions-error)

Jekyll’s quickstart (because I am impatient) helped me get installed and running (although not that quick):
[http://jekyllrb.com/docs/quickstart/](http://jekyllrb.com/docs/quickstart/)

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2 Responses to I’m No Doctor of Jekyll

  1. Pingback: Reclaiming Jekyll on GitHub | bavatuesdays

  2. Pingback: Reclaiming Jekyll on GitHub | bavatuesdays

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