Welcome to my blog
Hello and welcome to the first post on my blog. I’m intending this blog to be a place to host some of my previous and current writings, documenting some interesting technical challenges I’ve faced as well as the solutions I’ve designed to overcome them.
Fittingly, I’m going to first describe how I built this simple website. As you may have already noticed, it’s a static website that has been written in Markdown, processed by a Ruby package called Jekyll, and served on Github Pages. But how does that all work?
You’ll notice that this post lives in the _posts directory of this repository. After cloning the repository locally, you may need to install Ruby, bundle, and the prerequisite Gems to render the site locally. I was able to do so with sudo apt install jekyll to install Jekyll and Ruby, as well as bundle install to install the Gems.
Then, go ahead and edit this post and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run bundle exec jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.
To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.markdown and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works. After that, simply commit and push your new post and hey-presto, you’ve got a new post that appears not only on the home page, but also in the blog archive.
Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:
<reporting-org ref="AA-AAA-123456789" type="40" secondary-reporter="0">
<narrative>Organisation name</narrative>
<narrative xml:lang="fr">Nom de l'organisme</narrative>
</reporting-org>
<activities></activities>Lastly, Jekyll also has some useful plugins. For example, I’ve enabled ‘jekyll-feed’ which automatically creates an Atom (RSS-like) feed at /feed.xml. These can be enabled by specifying the version number in the Gemfile, and then including the plugin name in _config.yml.
Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo.
P.S. I might also recommend that anyone writing blogs in VS Code look into the Spell Checker extension. In VS Code, simply hit CTRL+P and then paste in ext install streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker, which will automatically install the extension. Otherwise, it’s very easy to accidentally misspell words!