Blogging with Octopress

Static html site generators automate many of the tedious steps that are necessary to create website. Octopress is a static html generator that automates many of the tedious tasks of static html site generators, and comes with a number of reasonable presets, configured right out of the box.

Static HTML Site Generators I looked at:

• Jekyll: https://jekyllrb.com/
• Jekyll-bootsrap: https://jekyllbootstrap.com/
• Pelican: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/
• Templer: https://www.steve.org.uk/Software/templer/ (HPR1203)
• Octopress: https://octopress.org

I settled on octopress for the following reasons:

SASS

Sass adds additional functionality to css such as variables, mixins, scopes, and was a tool that I had previously worked with.

Twitter Bootstrap

Twitter bootstrap is a set of templates that produce nice looking pages that are standards compliant, and adaptive so that they look good at any screen resolution.

HTML5 Video Plugin

I ended up creating my own, but Octopress has a HTML5 video plugin. Unfortunately this only supported H264 video, so I created my own to serve H264, Webm, and Ogv.

Deployment scripts

Octopress comes with rsync, and github pages support out of the box, so you can deploy your site with very little effort.

Requirements:

• Ruby 1.9.3 or above
• Git
• HTML knowledge
• Text Editor & Terminal

Install Requirements:

In Ubuntu 12.04 I did the following:

sudo apt-get install emacs git zlib1g-dev openssl libopenssl-ruby1.9.1 \
libssl-dev libruby1.9.1 libreadline-dev

Install ruby through rbenv

rbenv (https://rbenv.org)

git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
# set environment in ~/.bash_profile.  Change this to ~/.zshrc if using zshell
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile # You can change to .zshrc or .bashrc

Install ruby-build to make installing ruby easy

git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

Install ruby

rbenv install 1.9.3-p194
rbenv rehash

Octopress

https://octopress.org

Install Octopress

git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress
cd octopress
rbenv local 1.9.3-p194  

Install Ruby Requirements

gem install bundler
rbenv rehash
bundle install  

What is rake?

Rake is like make but for ruby.

Use rake scripts to setup and preview blog

rake -T # list all available rake tasks
rake install # install themes and default config
rake preview # generate and view site

Open localhost:4000 in your webbrowser

Setup Deployment

rake set_root_dir['blog-test']
rake setup_github_pages 
rake generate
# Change the following url to point to your repository
git remote add origin https://github.com/HarryGuerilla/blog-test.git
git config branch.master.remote origin
git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
git push origin master
rake deploy # this is where the magic happens

Configure Blog

emacs _config.yml
# Edit title, author, subtitle

Create First Post & Basic workflow:

rake new_post
emacs post
git add .
git commit -m "added new post"

Publish Blog

rake deploy