I was searching for something related to github. In the search, I came across Jekyll. So reading about Jekyll and hosting static site pages on github got me thinking about this blog. I wasn’t real motivated to do much as I am not a programmer and that is what the job was that I was asked to do. But I am a tinkerer and enjoy to learn new things. So I thought I would try it out.
Jekyll is a ruby-based set of scripts that converts markdown and css into static pages that can be stored pretty much anywhere. Github is a perfect place to put it in as it stores files. So my experiment began. I started by reading multiple people’s road to Jekyll including Scott Lowe, Tomomi Imura, and Hadi Hariri. I then began the quest. I call it a quest as it has taken several weeks to get to where I am and lots of adjustments.
It’s not like Wordpress was bad and who knows I may go back, but I like the idea of hosting my site off of a server in my homelab as it makes uptime more guaranteed. I had a couple of plugins in Wordpress that made my life easier with photo galleries so that is one thing I am still working on. There are some plugins for galleries but I think I am going to migrate my pictures over to a web-based repository and then CDN it back to my blog.
After messing around with Jekyll for about a week, I decided I needed to see what else was out there. I checked out a couple other static site page creators and then ran across Octopress. I started reading up on it and used the documentation from the site to migrate my data over from the Jekyll folder to the newly created Octopress folder. I then modified the template with CSS and came up with this template that is being used now. I will continue to modify things and hopefully will add more content as time goes on.
So this is the first series coming on the newly github hosted site. I still want to do a recap on the St. Louis VMware User Group #UserCon and I will probably be blogging again.
