I am dain

and these are my thoughts mostly on technology

Setting Up Octopress

Steps I’ve taken

Note: ‘username’ is your Github username and ‘myblog’ is the name of your blog / site which you’ll have to replace in the instructions. Don’t sweat too much about the latter, it’s just a project name you won’t necessary have to use on your site.

Set up Github repository for hosting

Go to: https://github.com/new

Fill in form and create repo called “username.github.com”

Set up Octopress

If you don’t have it yet, install rbenv and ruby-build (to handle Ruby runtimes and build gems). If you’re on Windows this is going to be a bit more complicated, but setting up RubyInstaller and Ruby Development Kit is not that bad.

$ rbenv install 1.9.2-p290
$ git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git myblog
$ cd myblog
$ gem install bundler
$ rbenv rehash
$ bundle install

Get a nice theme

$ git clone git://github.com/tommy351/Octopress-Theme-Slash.git .themes/slash
$ rake install['slash']

Configure Octopress

Edit at least “Main Configs” in _config.yml. You can come back later to fill in the rest.

Set site up for Github Pages

$ rake setup_github_pages

Paste your Github repo URL: git@github.com:username/username.github.com.git when prompted.

This will set up some folders and the structure of the Git repos. Master branch will track the actual generated website and source will be the sources you are going to edit.

Create your first post

$ rake new_post["Hello World!"]

Edit contents of myblog/source/_posts/yyyy-mm-dd-hello-world.markdown

Generate page and see it in your browser

$ rake generate
$ powify create myblog
$ powify browse myblog

See if it’s all good locally

$ rake deploy

Check the real thing: http://username.github.com

Puts ‘Hello World’

A brave new blog, this time powered by the impressive dream team of Ruby, Compass, Jekyll, Octopress and Github.

No database to worry about, back up and restore. Everything is in a Git repository, kindly hosted and served up to the world by Github.

All content is created in Markdown, hand typed in Mou.app.