This is the git repository for my academic website and blog, built using Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages with a custom domain name registered through DreamHost. Although I've used git and GitHub before, I don't know any ruby and this is my first time working with Jekyll. This readme serves as a record of everything I did to get the site up and running.
I initially tried to get things set up on my Mac at work, but this was a real pain. At home I'm running Ubuntu version 14.04 which is much easier to handle, so all of the instructions below refer to Linux.
Basic Jekyll Setup
The first thing I did was to install Ruby, RubyGems, and NodeJS via apt-get. after that, the quick-start instructions worked like a charm and I was able to start playing around with a bare-bones Jekyll site:
gem install jekyll
jekyll new myblog
cd myblog
The site is then available on your local machine at http://localhost:4000.
By browsing through the directories created by Jekyll and Googling for various bits and pieces that I didn't understand, I was able to get a good basic idea of how things work.
Getting Set Up for GitHub Pages
Although I already had a minimal working example of Jekyll to play around with on my machine, I wanted to eventually host my website on GitHub pages, so I neede to install a few more pre-requisites. For details, and a description of the build process, see GitHub Help: Using Jekyll with Pages.
Using a Custom Domain with GitHub Pages
Make sure to explain about the CNAME file, the correct IP address to set up with your DNS provider and the fact that it can take a long time for things to update! Eventually provide step-by-step instructions.
- GitHub Help: Setting up a custom domain
- GitHub Help: Configuring a custom apex domain
- Haikus in C: Foolproof Guide to Github Pages with a Custom Domain
The way to build with Jekyll locally to match what happens on GitHub Pages is
bundle exec jekyll serve
LaTeX Math in Jekyll
See this post on stackoverflow
A Simple Rakefile
Rake is like GNU make, only imnplemented in Ruby.
I wanted a simple way to generate "blank" blog posts that would automatically generate the appropriate yaml frontmatter and add a datestamp to the filename.
From a quick Google search it seemed that most people use rake for this, so I searched for the simplest possible rakefile I could find.
I found this one on StackOverflow, pasted it into an empty text document and saved it as Rakefile.rb in the root directory of fditraglia.github.io.
Then I ran
rake post TITLE="Test Post"
but it didn't work!
It turned out that there were two problems.
First I hadn't set up my default editor in my .bashrc file so the rakefile didn't know to open vim.
Second, and more insidiously, something must have gone wrong with my copy-and-paste since the yaml frontmatter was indented in the post, which broke the parsing.
The solution was simply to re-type the rakefile by hand.
(I think there was a stray tab or weird spacing issue somewhere).
Now everything works perfectly!
Customization
Add details about how I customized the default Jekyll header, footer and homepage. Link to Adrian Sampson whose github repo was really helpful for figuring some of this out.