The Obligatory "Hello World" Post

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it is Friday the 13th, and while I would not consider myself an overly superstitious person, I have been known to avoid sticking my chopsticks into my rice bowl, scrambling to avoid stepping on the entrance threshold of any particular jinja I may be visiting, and partaking in various other Asian superstitions (I live in Japan.) I am going to throw caution to the wind, and published my new blog today regardless.

I have spent a couple of days now building out this site in Jekyll, which is touted as a true “hackers” endeavor. Two months ago, and some change, I had created a repository in my GitHub account to take advantage of GitHub Pages, a free offering from the fine folks @ GitHub. Initially I had planned on using Octopress, but given its lack of apparent ongoing development, and my lack of experience with the underlying technology that Octopress extends, Jekyll, I opted to go with the later.

Jekyll is fairly painless to get running. I wanted to validate my Liquid and Markdown syntax and Sass preprocessing directives before submitting it to GitHub. This means I had to test it locally, and given Jekyll’s Ruby origin, I had to install Ruby and DevKit on my Windows machine to perform that step - which took the longest time. This Jekyll page made that easy, but I spent too much time swapping out Ruby versions and troubleshooting things like this and this.

I decided to start things out with a theme rather then starting from starch, and I thought the Type Theme was nice. The developer of this theme had implemented Sass, and included a nice setup in YAML front matter to allow references to various social media channels, and went to the effort of including a DISQUS reference. Nice.

8pod

The Obligatory "Hello World" Post