Gravatar

Luke Campbell

« luke.s.campbell@gmail.com »

Blogging for the Nerd

20 January 2012

So, I've been debating for a while now how to get this blog out there. My first blog system (which no one ever visited) was a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), whereby the entire blog was created and dynamically generated with PHP. The dynamic blogging system was fun but it became really bogged down as more posts were added.

Enter static blogging. A number of people I know swear by static blogging and with powerful tools like Rails, Sinatra and Git, blogging in the 21st century can be magnificent!

First things first:

How to Deploy Jekyll/Octopress to Heroku

This article is a great place to start and a lot of what I'm saying here is re-iterated.

Get jekyll:

    $ gem install jekyll

Get your own jekyll layout:

    $ git clone https://github.com/mojombo/mojombo.github.com.git

You can rename your repository or do with it what you like, personally I renamed it. For the purpose of this article let's rename it to my_blog and change a few things:

Make changes to your index.html to fit your needs. Now comes the posts section! Erase all the files in _posts, then go ahead and populate them with your own .md files.

Typically your posts look like this:

---
layout: post
title: Blogging for the Nerd
---

{{ page.title }}
================
Your content goes here.

Now comes the rakefile, adopting from the above tutorial I have tweaked something into this:

Rakefile

# Rakefile

require 'time'

deploy_default = "heroku"
deploy_branch = "master"
deploy_dir = "_heroku"
public_dir = '_site'
github_dir = '_github'
jekyll_path = '~/Workspace/jekyll/bin/jekyll'
app_name = 'your_heroku_app_name'

desc "deploy basic rack app to heroku"
multitask :heroku do
  puts "## Deploying to Heroku "
  (Dir["#{deploy_dir}/public/*"]).each { |f| rm_rf(f) }
  system "cp -R #{public_dir}/* #{deploy_dir}/public"
  puts "
## copying #{public_dir} to #{deploy_dir}/public"
  cd "#{deploy_dir}" do
    system "git add ."
    system "git add -u"
    puts "
## Committing: Site updated at #{Time.now.utc}"
    message = "Site updated at #{Time.now.utc}"
    system "git commit -m '#{message}'"
    puts "
## Pushing generated #{deploy_dir} website"
    system "git push heroku #{deploy_branch}"
    puts "
## Heroku deploy complete"
  end
end

multitask :github do
    puts "## Deploying to Github "
    (Dir["#{github_dir}/public/*"]).each { |f| rm_rf(f) }
    system "cp -R #{public_dir}/* #{github_dir}/"
    puts "
## copying #{public_dir} to #{github_dir}/"
    cd "#{github_dir}" do
      system "git add ."
      system "git add -u"
      puts "
## Committing: Site updated at #{Time.now.utc}"
      message = "Site updated at #{Time.now.utc}"
      system "git commit -m '#{message}'"
      puts "
## Pushing generated #{github_dir} website"
      system "git push origin #{deploy_branch}"
      puts "
## Github deploy complete"
    end
  end
desc 'Generate Layout'
task :new_post do
  t = Time.now
  d = '_posts/' + t.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') + '.md'
  l = t.strftime('%d %B %Y')
  puts 'Generating new post'
  layout = <<DOC
---
layout: post
title: Title
---

{{ page.title }}
================

DOC
  layout += "\n <p class='meta'>" + l + "</p>\n"
  File.open(d, 'w') do |f|
    f.puts layout
  end
  puts 'Created: ' + d
end

task :launch do
  system 'open http://' + app_name
end

task :jekyll do
  system jekyll_path + ' --auto --server'
end

So ideally your directory structure should resemble this:

Directory Structure

  Blogroot
    |+_github/
    |~_heroku/
    | |+public/
    | |-config.ru
    | |-Gemfile
    | `-README
    |~_layouts/
    | |-default.html
    | `-post.html
    |~_posts/
    | |-2012-01-01-Welcome.md
    | |-2012-01-16-Win.md
    | |-2012-01-20-Blog.md
    | `-2012-01-21-Applescript.md
    |+_site/
    |~css/
    | |-screen.css
    | `-syntax.css
    |~images/
    | `-rss.png
    |+random/
    |-_config.yml
    |-atom.xml
    |-CNAME
    |-index.html
    |-Rakefile
    `-README.textile

With all this you should be up and running and ready to go!

Luke