Blogging was really never easy task for me, I started in 2006 with WordPress but with short life. The more about my blogging history can be read in my blog post and finally comes time for Blogging! on my old blogging site Learn-a-holic.

Blog Engines

So far I was on this blog engines, chronologically:

• WordPress (2006 - 2008)
• Graffiti CMS (2008)
• BlogEngine.NET (2009)
• WordPress (2009 - 2012)

So far I was always coming back to WordPress, but I was never actually satisfied in writing posts in it, everything other than that is plain perfect on WordPress. This is why I haven’t blogging for nearly two years.

Nowdays I really like markdown or any similar kind of markup language (textile, creole,…), and I would prefer writing blog posts with markdown. In my case blog posts are more notes than the blog posts, because they are more technical, and there is lots of code snippets!

Octopress

Octopress is the very easy framework on top of Jekyll, and Jekyll is a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby.

Install

The official Octopress install is just to clone or fork the Octopress repo. I’ve chose to do fork then clone it from my forked repo.

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$ git clone git@github.com:xajler/octopress.git

Notes:

You’ll need to change the clone to your repository, since there is need for Read+Write access!

I’m lying a bit the first attempt was a clone, but afterwards I’ve chose to fork it, why?, you’ll need to read about it a little bit later.

Using Octopress with Rake

The Octopress uses Jim Weirich’s great make-like build utility Rake, for creating posts/pages, deploying, generating,…

Rake Install

The Octopress needs for the first time to generate the sandbox with theme and placeholder folder for posts. It can be achieved by running (needs to be in forked/cloned directory):

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$ rake install
## Copying classic theme into ./source and ./sass
mkdir -p source
cp -r .themes/classic/source/. source
mkdir -p sass
cp -r .themes/classic/sass/. sass
mkdir -p source/_posts
mkdir -p public

The command will create source and sass folders. The source/_posts folder is where the markdown posts will reside.

This is why I forked the Octopress, so that I can commit the posts as the markdown files, if I would clone it, I should have the write access to Octopress, to commit, this way I have my forked version and still I can always pull changes from upsteramed original Octopress, but more of this in separate post.

Creating first post

Create post with new_post['post name here']:

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$ rake new_post['Deploying Octopress to Github Pages and setting custom subdomain CNAME']
mkdir -p source/_posts
Creating new post: source/_posts/2012-10-10-deploying-octopress-to-github-pages-and-setting-custom-subdomain-cname.markdown

By opening it in your favorite editor you’ll get:

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---
layout: post
title: "Deploying Octopress to Github Pages and setting custom subdomain CNAME"
date: 2012-10-11 01:01
comments: true
categories:
---

Categories can be add in few ways, my way is one-liner:

categories: [octopress, github, github pages]

Generating the Site

Add some content to your first post and then run generate command that generates whole site:

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$ rake generate
## Generating Site with Jekyll
directory source/stylesheets/
   create source/stylesheets/screen.css
Configuration from /Users/xajler/src/octopress-orig/_config.yml
Building site: source -> public
Successfully generated site: source -> public

Preview Site

To locally preview generated Site use:

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$ rake preview
Starting to watch source with Jekyll and Compass. Starting Rack on port 4000
[2012-10-11 01:16:08] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2012-10-11 01:16:08] INFO  ruby 1.9.3 (2012-04-20) [x86_64-darwin12.0.0]
[2012-10-11 01:16:08] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=62929 port=4000
Configuration from /Users/xajler/src/octopress-orig/_config.yml

...

Then in browser navigate to:

http://localhost:4000/

The beauty of the preview is that Auto-regenerating is enabled by default. Meaning every save of blog post file will trigger generate command making it as live preview.

Configuring the Octopress

The Octopress configuration is in the root _config.yml file.

There you can change url, title, subtitle, permalink, twitter account, github account, and set site comments via disqus by providing disqus_short_name.

Deployment

Octopress supports Heroku, rsync and Github Pages deployment. I chose the Github Pages because Github provide the CNAME changes, so the site can be on your desired domain.

Github Pages setup

There are two ways of having pages on the Github.

The User/Organization pages http://username.github.com and project pages gh-pages.

The my way was the User/Organization pages.

Setting up the repository on Github

Create new repository on Github and named it as your User/Organization name plus .github.com in my case was xajler.github.com.

Configure Octopress for Github Pages

To prepare Octopress for deployment to Github Pages run commannd and write Repository url (git@github.com:xajler/xajler.github.com):

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$ rake setup_github_pages
Enter the read/write url for your repository
(For example, 'git@github.com:your_username/your_username.github.com)
Repository url: git@github.com:xajler/xajler.github.com
rm -rf _deploy
mkdir _deploy
cd _deploy
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/xajler/src/octopress-orig/_deploy/.git/
[master (root-commit) ac273d4] Octopress init
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 index.html
cd -

---
## Now you can deploy to http://xajler.github.com with `rake deploy` ##

This command will change git remote origin from Octopress forked/cloned url to:

git@github.com:xajler/xajler.github.com

And also add a _deploy folder, actual root of your Github Pages repository (github.com/xajler/xajler.github.com).

Deployment to Github Pages

The final rake command is deploy. It will create commit and push to Github repo and you’ll get notification to your mail.

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$ rake deploy
## Deploying branch to Github Pages
rm -rf _deploy/index.html

## copying public to _deploy
cp -r public/. _deploy
cd _deploy

## Commiting: Site updated at 2012-10-11 00:14:34 UTC
...

After deployment in your mail box will be a notification:

[xajler.github.com] Page build successful

Your page has been built. If this is the first time you've pushed, it may take a few minutes to appear, otherwise your changes should appear immediately.

And if you navigate to http://xajler.github.com (change xajler to your User/Organization name) you’ll see the post and site online!

The custom domain via CNAME

The http://xajler.github.com is not really the URL that you’ll want to have for the blog. Github provides the way to customize the domain name.

Setting custom domain name

To setup the custom domain name that will point to your Github pages, there is need to create the CNAME file in source folder. This CNAME will be copied to _deploy folder when executing rake deploy and will be used by Github to point to the provided domain.

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$ vim source/CNAME

I’ve added my subdomain for my domain metaintellect.

blog.metaintellect.com

Deploy with rake deploy and it should now be pushed and visible in your Github repo (xajler.github.com).

Setting DNS for subdomain

The DNS nameservers for my domain metaintellect are declared on dynadot.

Here is my configuration to make the blog.metaintellect.com CNAME work with Github Pages:

Conclusion

I hope that I will now blog my notes about so many tehnical IT stuff I do everyday, and now with markdown and the Github it is fairly easy and fun!